The challenges to humanity posed by the digital future, the first detailed examination of the unprecedented form of power called "surveillance capitalism," and the quest by powerful corporations to predict and control our behavior.

In this masterwork of original thinking and research, Shoshana Zuboff provides startling insights into the phenomenon that she has named surveillance capitalism. The stakes could not be higher: a global architecture of behavior modification threatens human nature in the twenty-first century just as industrial capitalism disfigured the natural world in the twentieth.

Zuboff vividly brings to life the consequences as surveillance capitalism advances from Silicon Valley into every economic sector. Vast wealth and power are accumulated in ominous new "behavioral futures markets," where predictions about our behavior are bought and sold, and the production of goods and services is subordinated to a new "means of behavioral modification."

The threat has shifted from a totalitarian Big Brother state to a ubiquitous digital architecture: a "Big Other" operating in the interests of surveillance capital. Here is the crucible of an unprecedented form of power marked by extreme concentrations of knowledge and free from democratic oversight. Zuboff's comprehensive and moving analysis lays bare the threats to twenty-first century society: a controlled "hive" of total connection that seduces with promises of total certainty for maximum profit--at the expense of democracy, freedom, and our human future.

With little resistance from law or society, surveillance capitalism is on the verge of dominating the social order and shaping the digital future--if we let it.

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Review

Reveals capitalism's most dangerous frontier with stunning clarity...A masterpiece of rare conceptual daring, beautifully written and deeply urgent.

-- "Robert B. Reich, New York Times bestselling author"

Everyone needs to read this book as an act of digital self-defense...Zuboff demonstrates not only how our minds are being mined for data but also how they are being rapidly and radically changed in the process.

-- "Naomi Klein, New York Times bestselling author"

The rare volume that puts a name on a problem just as it becomes critical.

-- " Wall Street Journal"

Unmissable...The Age of Surveillance Capitalism shines a searing light on how this latest revolution is transforming our economy, politics, society-and lives.

-- " Financial Times (London)"

[A] comprehensive work of scholarship and synthesis...A business model that seeks growth by cataloging our 'every move, emotion, utterance and desire' is too radical to be taken for granted. As Zuboff repeatedly says near the end of the book, 'It is not O.K.'

-- "New York Times"

About the Author

Shoshana Zuboff is the Charles Edward Wilson Professor emerita at Harvard Business School and a faculty associate at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University. She joined HBS's faculty in 1981 and was one of the first tenured women at HBS and the youngest professor to receive an endowed chair. She received her PhD in social psychology from Harvard University and her BA in philosophy from the University of Chicago. Her previous book, In the Age of the Smart Machine, was characterized on the front page of the New York Times Book Review as a work of rare originality. She has been a columnist for Fast Company and BusinessWeek.com, and strategy+business magazine named Zuboff one of the eleven most original business thinkers in the world.