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. In this masterwork of original thinking and
research Shoshana Zuboff provides startling insights into the phenomenon that she has named
surveillance capitalism. The stakes could not be higher: a global architecture of behavior
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 advances from Silicon Valley into every economic sector. Vast wealth
and power are accumulated in ominous new behavioral futures markets where predictions 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 democracy freedom and our human future. With little resistance from law or society
surveillance capitalism is on the verge of dominating the social order and shaping the digital
future -- if we let it.
