The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power by Shoshana Zuboff (review)

In The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, Shoshana Zuboff argues that technology companies have monetized metadata, usurping individuals’ expectations of privacy and compromising information integrity. Through ubiquitous and interconnected search engines, social media, and data-enabled devices, companies can conduct pervasive surveillance of individuals’ movements, decisions, and emotions, all in the interest of predicting and influencing consumer behaviour. Zuboff posits that this erosion of privacy threatens democracy.

Shoshana Zuboff is a professor emerita of the Harvard Business School whose previously published books, including In the Age of the Smart Machine: The Future of Work and Power (1988), explored the impact of connected devices on business and employment patterns. She notes that the questions she asked a few decades ago have now become urgent, as the speed of digital change leaves us little time for reaction. Questioning whether all change is positive, Zuboff acknowledges the benefits of the new technology but argues that even the big tech companies themselves cannot respond quickly enough to the negative phenomena their platforms have enabled: “We celebrate the networked world for the many ways in which it enriches our capabilities and prospects, but it has birthed whole new territories of anxiety, danger, and violence as the sense of a predictable future slips away” (p. 4).

Zuboff opens her newest book with a definition of the term surveillance capitalism, broken down into eight specific applications, ascending from “a new economic order that claims human experience as a free raw material for hidden commercial practices of extraction, prediction, and sales” to “an expropriation of critical human rights that is best understood as a coup from above: an overthrow of the people’s sovereignty” (p. vii). She then outlines the historical context of the issue, the entrenchment of the practices of surveillance capitalism from around 2015, and finally, her philosophical objections to the underpinnings of the phenomenon. Throughout, she suggests that individuals have agency, and that it is not too late to redress policies, address concerns, and reclaim the hopeful narratives that had originally been advanced by the giants of social networking and information sharing.

Many of the sub-themes Zuboff explores are relevant to archives and records management. She touches on data mining, data protection, artificial intelligence, blockchain, cloud storage, information integrity, access, and privacy. Most importantly, Zuboff challenges us to collectively consider an appropriate response to current and future challenges connected to technology and the gathering and sharing of information. In questioning the full consent that users give corporations to share their information in return for free email services and perks, Zuboff is not alone. As Canadian experts like the University of Guelph’s Rozita Dara have argued, the pace of change is so rapid that neither individuals nor government entities have had time to reflect and develop ethical guidelines and responses or to formulate coherent policies.

Some readers may be tempted to argue that sharing information has always been risky, but the digital environment has changed the risks in significant ways. Archivists are able to relate to the ethical challenges these changes represent. Traditionally, the active archives of private companies have been off limits to researchers, with the access conditions of dormant records established only after the company has gone out of business and any sensitive, personal information has been destroyed. A lot of this has had to do with trust. In a world where it is possible for a virtual assistant to record your search requests to a digital archive, to be used later for advertising, who decides what information is retained? When the goal of data sharing is to predict your next purchase, can you trust that a technology company will take responsibility for protecting the data they collect, and share it ethically? What does ethical sharing mean in this context? Even if the information seems innocuous, how can you be sure it will...