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Open The Age of Surveillance Capitalism
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The Age of Surveillance Capitalism

Shoshana Zuboff • 2019

69 pages147 min

Surveillance capitalism is defined as a novel economic order that commodifies human experience as raw material for behavioral prediction and sale, driven by machine intelligence. Pioneered by companies like Google and Facebook, it subordinates traditional production to "means of behavioral modification," leading to unprecedented wealth concentration. Operating through ubiquitous digital architecture (Big Other), it manipulates behavior via "economies of action" (tuning, herding, conditioning), often without individual awareness. This system challenges fundamental democratic rights like privacy and self-determination, reducing individuals to "human natural resources." The text warns of a "coup from above," replacing market democracy with an instrumentarian society where freedom is sacrificed for commercial certainty, threatening human nature itself.