The metaphor Zuboff uses is one of conquest: “With so little left that could be commodified, the last virgin territory was private human experience.” In 1986, 1% of the world’s information was digitised. In the same year, Facebook was founded, its business model also based on the capture of and access to personal information. Gmail was launched in 2004 Google subsequently admitted that it has scanned private correspondence for personal information. It is the story of the digital revolution, and how the early utopian prospects of the web darkened into “a rogue mutation of capitalism marked by concentrations of wealth, knowledge and power unprecedented in human history”. “One odd thing: when the house burned, that old notebook from DC survived.” Not long after this, Zuboff began to write Surveillance Capitalism. The family escaped, but lost all their possessions - books, research materials, passports. In 2009, their home was struck by lightning and burned to the ground. With her husband, Zuboff went to live in rural Maine they raised their children, farmed deer. She later became one of the youngest professors to receive an endowed chair. On the strength of her first book, Zuboff became one of the first tenured women at Harvard Business School. It was followed by The Support Economy: Why Corporations Are Failing Individuals and the Next Episode of Capitalism (2002), co-authored with her husband, James Maxmin, a former CEO of companies including Laura Ashley and a Distinguished Scholar at MIT, who died in 2016. Long before the emergence of the internet, Zuboff argued that everything that could be translated into information would be – exchanges, events, objects – and that data streams would be used wherever possible for surveillance and control. This led to Zuboff’s first book In the Age of the Smart Machine: The Future of Work and Power (1988) – a startlingly prophetic analysis of how information technology would transform working lives. This has been the agenda for my intellectual life since then.” “I realised then the process of computerisation would be the next industrial revolution, and it would change everything – including how we think, and feel and how we create meaning.
#Capitalism has the ability to subsume unto itself series
“One day I had just finished the graveyard shift, and I wandered into the National Gallery of Art, where I saw these hulking, dirty, dark entities in the pit of a bright white amphitheatre.” It was the Voltri-Bolton series by David Smith – an American sculptor who in the 1960s created sculptures from old factory machinery and debris. In 1978, Zuboff was working at the Washington Post, with linotypists who were converting to cold type. People were saying ‘My work is floating in space!’” “They were expecting immediate productivity, growth, efficiency. To earn money, she became an organisational change consultant, working in offices that were “computerising” for the first time. She was a postgraduate at Harvard, writing a doctorate on the Industrial Revolution. Her work on the themes of The Age of Surveillance Capitalism began as far back as the late 1970s. She is brilliantly erudite and outlines her argument in trenchant, honed phrases, as if reading aloud. She has dark eyes behind horn-rimmed glasses abundant black curls a low, resonant voice. Later, in an unglamorous spot by some parked vans, Zuboff explains why she wrote her book.
This is the “surveillance capitalism” of the title, which Zuboff defines as a “new economic order” and “an expropriation of critical human rights that is best understood as a coup from above”. It describes how global tech companies such as Google and Facebook persuaded us to give up our privacy for the sake of convenience how personal information (“data”) gathered by these companies has been used by others not only to predict our behaviour but also to influence and modify it and how this has had disastrous consequences for democracy and freedom.
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