Shoshana Zuboff is the Charles Edward Wilson Professor
emerita, Harvard Business School. She is the author of In The Age
of the Smart Machine: the Future of Work and Power and The Support
Economy: Why Corporations Are Failing Individuals and the Next
Episode of Capitalism. She received her Ph.D. from Harvard
University and her BA from the University of Chicago. For more
information see: ShoshanaZuboff.com.
@shoshanazuboff
An International BestsellerA New York Times Notable Book of the
YearA Financial Times Best Book of the Year
A Sunday Times (UK) Best Business Book of the Year Selected by
Barack Obama, Zadie Smith (in the Wall Street Journal), Jia
Tolentino (in the New Yorker), Elif Shafak (in the Guardian), and
Ana Botin (in Bloomberg) as one of the best books of 2019
Finalist for the Financial Times/McKinsey Best Book of the Year
Award
"A panoramic exploration of one of the most urgent issues of our
times, Zuboff reinterprets contemporary capitalism through the
prism of the digital revolution, producing a book of immense
ambition and erudition. Zuboff is one of our most prescient and
profound thinkers on the rise of the digital. In an age of inane
Twitter soundbites and narcissistic Facebook posts, Zuboff's
serious scholarship is great cause for celebration."--AndrewKeen,
author of How to Fix the Future
"The Age of Surveillance Capitalism is brilliant and essential.
Shoshana Zuboff reveals capitalism's most dangerous frontier with
stunning clarity: The new economic order of surveillance capitalism
founded on extreme inequalities of knowledge and power. Her
sweeping analysis demonstrates the unprecedented challenges to
human autonomy, social solidarity, and democracy perpetrated by
this rogue capitalism. Zuboff's book finally empowers us to
understand and fight these threats effectively--a masterpiece of
rare conceptual daring, beautifully written and deeply urgent."
--RobertB. Reich, author of The Common Goodand Saving Capitalism:
For the Many, Notthe Few
"Shoshana Zuboff has produced the most provocative compelling moral
framework thus far for understanding the new realities of our
digital environment and its anti-democratic threats. From now on,
all serious writings on the internet and society will have to take
into account with The Age of Surveillance Capitalism."--Joseph
Turow, Robert Lewis Shayon ChairProfessor, Annenberg School,
University of Pennsylvania
"An original and often brilliant work, and it arrives at a crucial
moment, when the public and its elected representatives are at last
grappling with the extraordinary power of digital media and the
companies that control it. Like another recent masterwork of
economic analysis, Thomas Piketty's 2013 Capital in the
Twenty-First Century, the book challenges assumptions, raises
uncomfortable questions about the present and future, and stakes
out ground for a necessary and overdue debate. Shoshana Zuboff has
aimed an unsparing light onto the shadowy new landscape of our
lives. The picture is not pretty."--NicholasCarr, LOS ANGELES
REVIEW OF BOOKS
"Extraordinarily intelligent... Absorbing Zuboff's methodical
determination, the way she pieces together sundry examples into
this comprehensive work of scholarship and synthesis, requires
patience, but the rewards are considerable - a heightened sense of
awareness, and a deeper appreciation of what's at stake. A business
model that seeks growth by cataloging our 'every move, emotion,
utterance and desire' is too radical to be taken for granted. As
Zuboff repeatedly says near the end of the book, 'It is not
O.K.'"--JenniferSzalai, NEW YORK TIMES
"Many adjectives could be used to describe Shoshana Zuboff's latest
book: groundbreaking, magisterial, alarming, alarmist,
preposterous. One will do: unmissable... As we grope around in the
darkness trying to grasp the contours of our digital era, The Age
of Surveillance Capitalism shines a searing light on how this
latest revolution is transforming our economy, politics, society -
and lives."--John Thornhill, FINANCIAL TIMES
"My mind is blown on every page by the depth of Shoshana's
research, the breadth of her knowledge, the rigor of her intellect,
and finally by the power of her arguments. I'm not sure we can end
the age of surveillance capitalism without her help, and that's why
I believe this is the most important book of our time."--Doc
Searls, author of The Intention Economy, editor-in-chief, Linux
Journal
"Shoshana Zuboff's The Age of Surveillance Capitalism is already
drawing comparisons to seminal socioeconomic investigations like
Rachel Carson's "Silent Spring" and Karl Marx's "Capital." Zuboff's
book deserves these comparisons and more: Like the former, it's an
alarming exposé about how business interests have poisoned our
world, and like the latter, it provides a framework to understand
and combat that poison. But The Age of Surveillance Capitalism,
named for the now-popular term Zuboff herself coined five years
ago, is also a masterwork of horror. It's hard to recall a book
that left me as haunted as Zuboff's, with its descriptions of the
gothic algorithmic daemons that follow us at nearly every instant
of every hour of every day to suck us dry of metadata. Even those
who've made an effort to track the technology that tracks us over
the last decade or so will be chilled to their core by Zuboff,
unable to look at their surroundings the same way."--Sam Biddle,
THE INTERCEPT
"The rare volume that puts a name on a problem just as it becomes
critical... This book's major contribution is to give a name to
what's happening, to put it in cultural and historical perspective,
and to ask us to pause long enough to think about the future and
how it might be different from today."--Frank Rose, WALLSTREET
JOURNAL
"A book that no tech industry official will want the American
public to read... One of the true joys of this insanely brilliant,
deeply unsettling book is how fluidly Ms. Zuboff's style
incorporates jargon, analogy, research and memoir."--PITTSBURGH
POST-GAZETTE
"A definitive, stunning analysis of how digital giants like Google,
Facebook, etc. have single-mindedly pursued data on human behavior
as fodder for generating predictions and shaping outcomes salable
to advertisers and others...The scope of her analysis is
extraordinary; in addition to covering philosophical, social, and
political implications she discusses needed privacy
regulation...This book is pathbreaking, illuminating, and
unnerving."--CHOICE
"A warning bell, sounded clearly for both the people in danger and
of those with the power to do something to keep them safe... a
truly sobering shock to the system, a call for ordinary people to
re-assert control before it's too late."--THE NATIONAL (UAE)
"An intensively researched, engagingly written chronicle of
surveillance capitalism's origins and its deleterious prospects for
our society... [Zuboff's] after something bigger, providing a
scaffolding of critical thinking from which to examine the great
crises of the digital age... This is the rare book that we should
trust to lead us down the long hard road of understanding."--Jacob
Silverman, NEWYORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW
"Chilling and essential."--GLOBE AND MAIL
"Eye-opening...she raises questions about businesses that mine
personal data, manipulate our desires for instantaneous
information, and encourage us to narcissistically display our egos
and foibles on social media platforms."--SAN ANTONIO
EXPRESS-NEWS
"From the very first page I was consumed with an overwhelming
imperative: everyone needs to read this book as an act of digital
self-defense. With tremendous lucidity and moral courage, Zuboff
demonstrates not only how our minds are being mined for data but
also how they are being rapidly and radically changed in the
process. The hour is late and much has been lost already-but as we
learn in these indispensable pages, there is still hope for
emancipation."--Naomi Klein, author of ThisChanges Everything and
No Logo, and Gloria Steinem Chair in Media, Culture, and Feminist
Studies at RutgersUniversity
"I will make a guarantee: Assuming we survive to tell the tale, The
Age of Surveillance Capitalism has a high probability of joining
the likes Adam Smith's The Wealth of Nations and Max Weber's
Economy and Society as defining social-economics texts of modern
times. It is not a 'quick read'; it is to be savored and re-read
and discussed with colleagues and friends. No zippy one-liners from
me, except to almost literally beg you to read/ingest this
book."--TomPeters, coauthor of In Search of Excellence
"If a book's importance is gauged by how effectively it describes
the world we're in, and how much potential it has to change said
world, then in my view it's easily the most important book to be
published this century... Zuboff is concerned with the largest act
of capitalist colonisation ever attempted, but the colonisation is
of our minds, our behaviour, our free will, our very selves. Yet
it's not an anti-tech book. It's anti unregulated capitalism, red
in tooth and claw. It's really this generation's Das Kapital."
--Zadie Smith
"In the future, if people still read books, they will view this as
the classic study of how everything changed. The Age of
Surveillance Capitalism is amasterpiece that stunningly reveals the
essence of twenty-first-century society, and offers a dire warning
about technology gone awry that we ignore at our peril. Shoshana
Zuboff has somehow escaped from the fishbowl in which we all now
live, and introduced to us the concept of water. A work of
penetrating intellect, this is also a deeply human book about what
is becoming, as it relentlessly demonstrates, a dangerously inhuman
time."--Kevin Werbach, TheWharton School, University of
Pennsylvania, and author of The Blockchain and the New Architecture
of Trust
"One of the most important criticisms of the power of Big
Tech."--Rana Foroohar, FINANCIAL TIMES
"Staggeringly brilliant."--WINNIPEG FREE PRESS
"The defining challenge for the future of the market economy is the
concentration of data, knowledge, and surveillance power. Not just
our privacy but our individuality is at stake, and this very
readable and thought-provoking book alerts us to these existential
dangers. Highly recommended."--DaronAcemoglu, coauthor of Why
Nations Fail
"The most ambitious attempt yet to paint the bigger picture and to
explain how the effects of digitisation that we are now
experiencing as individuals and citizens have come about... A
continuation of a tradition that includes Adam Smith, Max Weber,
Karl Polanyi and-dare I say it-Karl Marx... A striking and
illuminating book."--THE OBSERVER
"Zuboff is a strikingly original voice, simultaneously bold and
wise, eloquent and passionate, learned and accessible. Read this
book to understand the inner workings of today's digital
capitalism, its threats to twenty-first century society, and the
reforms we must make for a better tomorrow."--Frank Pasquale,
University of Maryland Carey School of Law, Author of The Black Box
Society
"Zuboff's expansive, erudite, deeply-researched exploration of
digital futures elucidates the norms and hidden terminal goals of
information-intensive industries. Zuboff's book is the information
industry's Silent Spring."--ChrisHoofnagle, University of
California, Berkeley
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