I remember sitting at my desk in my study early in 2012, and I was listening to a speech that Eric Schmidt gave somewhere. I was hoping you could say something about whatever semantic games Facebook and other similar data brokers are doing when they say they don’t sell data. Zuboff recently took a moment to walk me through the implications of her urgent and crucial book. This interview was condensed and edited for clarity. Instead of labor, surveillance capitalism feeds on every aspect of every human’s experience.” It revives Karl Marx’s old image of capitalism as a vampire that feeds on labor, but with an unexpected turn. “At its core, surveillance capitalism is parasitic and self-referential. “Digital connection is now a means to others’ commercial ends,” writes Zuboff. You’re not technically the product, she explains over the course of several hundred tense pages, because you’re something even more degrading: an input for the real product, predictions about your future sold to the highest bidder so that this future can be altered. The cliched refrain that if you’re “not paying for a product, you are the product”? Too weak, says Zuboff. Tech’s privacy scandals, which seem to appear with increasing frequency both in private industry and in government, aren’t isolated incidents, but rather brief glimpses at an economic and social logic that’s overtaken the planet while we were enjoying Gmail and Instagram. “Whether you are complaining about your acne or engaging in political debate on Facebook, searching for a recipe or sensitive health information on Google, ordering laundry soap or taking photos of your nine-year-old, smiling or thinking angry thoughts, watching TV or doing wheelies in the parking lot, all of it is raw material for this burgeoning text.” “The result is that both the world and our lives are pervasively rendered as information,” Zuboff writes.

Even if you’ve followed the news items and historical trends that gird Zuboff’s analysis, her telling takes what look like privacy overreaches and data blunders, and recasts them as the intentional movements of a global system designed to violate you as a revenue stream. Cover: Public Affairs BooksAn unavoidable takeaway of “The Age of Surveillance Capitalism” is, essentially, that everything is even worse than you thought.

The age of surveillance capitalism book