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

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.

Daron Acemoglu, coauthor of Why Nations Fail

Zuboffs expansive, erudite, deeply researched exploration of digital futures elucidates the norms and hidden terminal goals of information-intensive industries. Zuboffs book is the information industrys Silent Spring.

Chris Hoofnagle, University of California, Berkeley

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, Zuboffs serious scholarship is great cause for celebration.

Andrew Keen, author of How to Fix the Future

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 alreadybut as we learn in these indispensable pages, there is still hope for emancipation.

Naomi Klein, author of This Changes Everything and No Logo, and Gloria Steinem Chair in Media, Culture, and Feminist Studies at Rutgers University

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 todays 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

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 of Adam Smiths The Wealth of Nations and Max Webers 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.

Tom Peters, coauthor of In Search of Excellence

The Age of Surveillance Capitalism is brilliant and essential. Shoshana Zuboff reveals capitalisms 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. Zuboffs book finally empowers us to understand and fight these threats effectivelya masterpiece of rare conceptual daring, beautifully written and deeply urgent.

Robert B. Reich, author of The Common Good and Saving Capitalism: For the Many, Not the Few

My mind is blown on every page by the depth of Shoshanas research, the breadth of her knowledge, the rigor of her intellect, and finally by the power of her arguments. Im not sure we can end the age of surveillance capitalism without her help, and thats why I believe this is the most important book of our time.

Doc Searls, author of The Intention Economy, and editor-in-chief ofLinux Journal

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 The Age of Surveillance Capitalism.

Joseph Turow, Robert Lewis Shayon Professor of Communication, Annenberg School, University of Pennsylvania

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 a masterpiece 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.