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.
Shoshana Zuboff's
interdisciplinary breadth and depth enable her to come to grips with
the social, political, business, and technological meaning of the
changes taking place in our time. We are at a critical juncture in
the confrontation between the vast power of giant high-tech companies
and government, the hidden economic logic of surveillance capitalism,
and the propaganda of machine supremacy that threaten to shape and
control human life. Will the brazen new methods of social engineering
and behavior modification threaten individual autonomy and democratic
rights and introduce extreme new forms of social inequality? Or will
the promise of the digital age be one of individual empowerment and
democratization?
The Age of
Surveillance Capitalism is neither a hand-wringing narrative of
danger and decline nor a digital fairy tale. Rather, it offers a
deeply reasoned and evocative examination of the contests over the
next chapter of capitalism that will decide the meaning of
information civilization in the twenty-first century. The stark issue
at hand is whether we will be the masters of information and machines
or its slaves.