Like the twentieth-century workers who were distanced from the knowledge and control of the end product of their labor by the segmentation of production chains across many factories, we now are distanced from the knowledge of how our “information” is being used to produce value today because of the firewalls that digital privacy giants erect between our experience of the digital world and their use of that experience. Zuboff claims that we collectively miss this truth because our experience of the digital world is fragmented and marked by a process of alienation. Indeed, we give away our privacy to Google, and not just to Google, as Google makes a huge profit by selling such a wealth of behavioral data to many other agencies and companies that analyze and use our data to “fudge” our future behaviors. Zuboff shows us the very high price we in fact “agree” to pay for that service. Think of the Google searches we run every day: we feel in debt to this company that offers us such a valuable “free” service. These new concepts are abstract on purpose, as the new vocabulary she introduces helps us move away from the misleading “pre-notions,” as Emile Durkheim would have called them, that cage us into docile acceptance of the “free” goods that digital giants are supposedly serving us out of altruism. To describe these processes, Zuboff coins a series of new concepts-uncontract, behavioral surplus, predictive markets, division of learning, shadow texts-which are systematically organized into a novel theory of value extraction and distribution in the new (“surveillance”) phase of contemporary capitalism. But reading this book makes us understand that few of us are aware of the nature and scale of the operations through which such accumulation of power/knowledge operates and its effects on our freedom.ĬRITICAL THEORY IN THE AGE OF SURVEILLANCE CAPITALISM They will also have heard of the scandals that have sporadically burgeoned at the surface of the public’s attention, like the use of personal data to derive voting predictions by Cambridge Analytica, whose practices, as Shoshana Zuboff ( Reference Zuboff2019) reveals, were not very different from the daily operation of the more established “surveillance capitalist” companies. Many readers will be aware of the context in which these broad changes have happened-namely, the alliance between digital and social media companies and national security agencies formed after 9/11. To begin with, it is driven by the highest theoretical ambition put to the service of enlightening the general public about the fundamental threats to our freedom and dignity represented by the unprecedented and unaccountable concentrations of knowledge and power in the hands of a few capitalists. The Age of Surveillance Capitalism is a landmark text for many reasons (Zuboff Reference Zuboff2019).

In the age of surveillance capitalism