Authors: Shoshana Zuboff

What: Shoshana Zuboff presents a comprehensive analysis of a modern paradigm shift that has emerged in the digital age. She characterises surveillance capitalism as ‘a new economic order that claims human experience as free raw material for hidden commercial practices of extraction, prediction, and sales’, among other definitions.

Why it is important: The identification and detailed articulation of surveillance capitalism as a new and distinct economic system is key as it informs the activities of several organisations in the current scenario. Tech giants such as Google, Apple, Microsoft, etcetera, that are now critical to all economic actors, are often seen as revolutionary and standalone but Zuboff puts their actions in the larger social framework of surveillance capitalism.

The Age of Surveillance Capitalism