The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power by Zuboff, Shoshana - 2020

US: PublicAffairs, 2020. Paperback. Very Good. A copy that has been read, but is in excellent condition. Pages are intact and not marred by notes or highlighting.The spine remains undamaged. The challenges to humanity posed by the digital future, the first detailed examination of the unprecedented form of power called "surveillance capital ism," and the quest by powerful corporations to predict and control our beh avior. In this masterwork of original thinking and research, Shoshana Zuboff provi des startling insights into the phenomenon that she has named surveillance capitalism. The stakes could not be higher: a global architecture of behavi or 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 a dvances from Silicon Valley into every economic sector. Vast wealth and pow er are accumulated in ominous new "behavioral futures markets," where predi ctions 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 dem.