zuboff shoshana the age of surveillance capitalism

Private human experience becomes a commodity in this new economic model. Surveillance capitalism unilaterally claims private human experience as a source of free raw material that can be brought into the marketplace, used for production and ultimately used for sale. In the book you take issue with the oft-used phrase: ‘If the service is free, then you are the product,’ retorting ‘You are not the product you are the abandoned carcass.’ What’s the distinction? They had to observe through a one-way mirror. So, right from the start, they understood that these mechanisms had to be hidden. What puts the ‘surveillance’ in surveillance capitalism? Google understood that just grabbing your experience, bringing it into data for their own systems of production and sales, was not going to sit well with people.

You’re taking a public good and bringing it into the market sphere. Surveillance capitalism is comparable to industrial capitalism’s annexation of nature but the commodity that it’s creating is based on private human experience. There are now apps to let you know where there’s a parking space, and you can actually hire people to go and claim the parking space for you. On the small scale, we see this happening around us all the time. The meadows and the forests and the rivers were turned into commodities that could be sold and purchased – real estate and so forth. The key flywheel in the evolution of industrial capitalism was the idea of claiming nature for the market dynamic.

Capitalism evolves by continuously claiming things that exist outside the market dynamic, bringing them into the market dynamic and turning them into commodities. The way I like to explain surveillance capitalism is to put it in a historical context.

For those of us who are a little rusty on our economic and political theory, can you explain the concept of surveillance capitalism?

Zuboff shoshana the age of surveillance capitalism