Author: Zuboff, Shoshana
Title: The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The fight for a human future at the new frontier of power
Publisher: Public Affairs, Hachette Book Group, New York
Year: 2019
Link: http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/1194529251
Open access link: https://archive.org/details/shoshanazubofftheageofsurveillancecapitalism/page/n1/mode/2up
page 22 (in the OA digital version):
Surveillance capitalism's products and services are not the objects of a value exchange. ... We are not surveillance capitalism's "customers". Although the saying tells us "It it's free, then you are the product," that is also incorrect. We are the sources of surveillance capitalism's crucial surplus: the objects of a technologically advanced and increasingly inescapable raw-material-extraction operation. Surveillance capitalism's actual customers are the enterprises that trade in its markets for future behavior.
In a modern capitalist society, technology was, is, and always will be an expression of the economic objectives that direct it into action. ...
We are not alone in falling prey to the technology illusion. It is an enduring theme of social thought, as old as the Trojan horse. Despite this, each generation stumbles into the quicksand of forgetting that technology is an expression of other interests. In modern times this means the interests of capital, and in our time it is surveillance capital that commands the digital milieu and directs our trajectory toward the future.
...
page 230 (in the OA digital version):
As industries far beyond the technology sector are lured by surveillance profits, the ferocity of the race to find and render experience as data has turned rendition into a global project of surveillance capital. .... as rendition operations move into the real world, seizing fresh unexpected chunks of human experience. ... All that is moist and alive must hand over its facts. There can be no shadow, no darkness. The unknown is intolerable. The solitary is forbidden.
...
page 336 (in the print edition):
[Carl] Friedrich was among the first scholars of totalitarianism to address this experience of improbability, writing in 1954 that "virtually no one before 1914 anticipated the course of development which has overtaken Western civilization since then... none of the outstanding scholars in history, law, and the social sciences discerned what was ahead... which culminated in totalitarianism. To this failure to foresee corresponds a difficulty in comprehending."
2023-12-19: reading paused at page 125 (book returned to library)
to-do list:
2024-03-11: reading paused at page 386 (in Chapter 13) (book returned to library; Kindle edition purchased)
to-do list: