# data[].attributes.body
The rise of social media platforms such as Facebook, google and amazon is both positive and negative. Through social media apps people are able to connect to other people from any part of the world, and they are able to see the latest updates of things such as news. In terms of surveillance capitalism, people are able to have personalized services and experiences, Convenience (via cookies etc.) and Lower prices (of services and experiences). On the other hand it get be negative as there can be less privacy, increase in cyber insecurity, surge pricing increase and increase supply side manipulation. Therefore, surveillance capitalism is both positive and negative in many ways.

Source: The Pros and Cons of Surveillance Capitalism | Cognizant

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
In time, 2019 will come to be seen as an epochal year - perhaps as significant as 1066, 1776, 1848, 1939. As in those moments of era defining history, we are at a point where the trajectory of the future is being set. Here at the Center for the Future of Work we have written extensively about the positive power of technology to change our world for the good. But it is the dark side of technology that has come fully into relief in the last few months.

Two books published this year have crystalized quite what is at stake as ones and zeros come to dominate every aspect of our lives. Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power by Shoshana Zuboff and Permanent Record by Edward Snowden are texts that, in my opinion, will take their place alongside the great books of the human experience for as long as that may last. Neither will find their way there for the quality of their prose; Zuboff's book is a long, tough slog frankly. Snowden's is a better read and if no ghosts were involved, well, I tip my chapeau, but it is still no King Lear or Catch-22.

The reason they are so important is because they shine an unsparing spotlight on how technology has edged us towards the future that George Orwell warned us about in Nineteen Eighty-Four. Since it was published Orwell's masterpiece has been the totemic argument against the overreach of government and the perils of institutional power (public or private) overwhelming the individual. For someone of my generation, Nineteen Eighty-Four was one of the set books that taught us to be distrustful of power whether it be in the east, or the west, or on the streets, or our workplaces, or in our own homes. Its themes permeated the language - "Doublethink", the "thought police", "Big Brother is watching you", the culture - Pink Floyd's The Wall, Elvis Costello's Night Rally, TV shows Room 101 and Big Brother, the technology - the classic 1984 Apple advert, and the politics - to Reagan and Thatcher the U.S.S.R. was Big Brother.

Orwell's warning was profound and stark, yet here we are, 71 year later, and as Zuboff and Snowden make painfully clear, we have failed to heed it. The governments of many, if not most, G20 countries record our every digital move. Large corporations access (without our knowledge) vast troves of information about our digital lives too. The devices around us listen to us talk. Our thoughts and actions are predicted and gamed and monetized in ways that would amaze, but not surprise Orwell. The public square is full of disinformation; the public discourse is full of hate (lasting far longer than two minutes); we are at permanent war (though we know not really who with); trust in public officials, and in each other, has never been lower; and the "unmanaged" space in which we have to simply be, gets smaller and smaller as each piece of technology that we use is drawn tighter and tighter into a "mesh" around our very existence.

Zuboff and Snowden lay out the details of what has happened in the last couple of decades in their respective fields; as a Harvard Business School professor, Zuboff has observed and taught the rules of modern business success. As an operative within various "three-letter-agencies", Snowden built the surveillance infrastructure that he then exposed. Though neither book references the other, in my mind they are in essence examining two sides of the same coin. Surveillance Capitalism outlines how commercial corporations use data harvested from individuals to sell advertising, goods, and services. Permanent Record outlines how the U.S. government (and its allies) uses data harvested from individuals to protect national security. Though neither author makes this point, it should be noted that the core technology that underlies these efforts, in both the public and private sector, comes from the same gene pool - and all roads lead to one of President Trump's primary technology advisors.

I read both books over the summer and finished them feeling deeply worried and disturbed. But as we near the end of the year the lack of impact they have had is beginning to worry and disturb me even more. Admittedly, Surveillance Capitalism is on the shortlist for the Financial Times Book of the Year award, and Edward Snowden blew up the Internet when he was on the Joe Rogan Experience recently, but neither book is on the lips of the folks I talk to in a professional or personal capacity. At a big event in Washington D.C. the other day I referenced Zuboff's work and hardly anyone there (bigwigs at the intersection of tech, business, and policy) even knew her name, let alone had read her book. Snowden is clearly a polarizing figure and in this age of de-platforming and ghosting (not a reference to writing support this time) is perhaps too risky a figure to too vocally support.

One person who I have spent a lot of time talking about the books to though has been a close personal friend of mine, who is the Chief Financial Officer of a major British PLC. It was his push back against my worry and concern that prompted me to try and analyze why I'm so worried and disturbed. To my friend, Netflix and Amazon and Facebook and cookies that make websites faster and more convenient are great - "what's the problem?". In his eyes, anything that keeps people safe and stops bad guys is a good thing too.

My friends view really stopped me in my tracks. Perhaps his perspective was actually the reason that Surveillance Capitalism and Permanent Record haven't got the traction that I was expecting they would. Perhaps my worries and concerns are the minority view and a somewhat uninterested acceptance of surveillance and surveillance capitalism is the view of the majority. Perhaps people didn't imbibe Orwell's writing as deeply as I did, or take it as seriously. Perhaps they've forgotten him. Or perhaps they simply don't care - life is too short and too full of more immediate worries and amusements to get too agitated about things so complex and tough to grapple with.

The more I pondered on the CFO's views the more it took me back to the framework that we had proposed in our 2014 book, Code Halos: How the Digital Lives of People, Things, and Organizations are Changing the Rules of Business. The "give to get" ratio was an observation that if the value of what an individual gets - personalized services, convivence, faster outcomes, lower cost - is greater than what that individual gives - personal data, which has little immediate value to the individual - then the individual will in all likelihood accept the tradeoff of personal data for a good, service or experience. This concept, we argued in our book, is at the heart of the FAANG success story (which has changed the rules of business). The CFO's views seemed in line with this perspective.

What has changed though - at least in my thinking - thanks to Zuboff and Snowden, is an appreciation of the value of personal data and what is being lost if it is given anyway without consideration. Zuboff makes the case that the FAANG vendors have used our data (our "behavioral surplus" in her language) in a manner akin to the conquistadores of the 16 th century; i.e., by monetizing something that previously had no monetary value to the conquered - in the Age of Discovery, land, in the Age of Algorithms, "Code Halos". Snowden argues that the Intelligence Community has trampled over the Constitution and changed the rights of men and women in a way that has never been subjected to a democratic vote. Few politicians have been aware of what has been going on and consequently no one in the general public has had a clue. An infrastructure has been built with the public purse but without public assent.

To structure my thoughts, and to try and frame the tension between my concern and my friend's indifference, the following list of "pros" and "cons" of surveillance and surveillance capitalism outline what is at stake.

SURVEILLANCE

Keeps good guys safe

Keeps bad guys out

Unobtrusive

Acts as a deterrent

Encourages good behavior

Captures "precrime" data

Acts as reassurance

Reduces personal privacy

Reduces personal freedom

Freezes free speech

Creates a "Big Brother" society

Creates a "nanny state"

Brings into disrepute the role of government

Blurs moral and legal boundaries

Undermines the rule of law

Increases societal "paranoia"

Feeds the lunatic fringe

Everlasting/uninventable infrastructure

SURVEILLANCE CAPITALISM

Convenience (via cookies etc.)

Personalized services and experiences

Lower prices (of services and experiences)

Reduces personal privacy

Increases cyber insecurity (hacking etc.)

Value of personal data accrues to third parties

Narrows choices through creation of algorithmic "echo chambers"

Increases supply side manipulation

Surge pricing increases

Information asymmetry (supply side high, demand side low)

"Myth of convenience" (e.g. password management)

Everlasting/uninventable infrastructure

The first observation you may have when looking at this table is that there are many more cons than pros. That is telling. In fact, when looked at cold, the pros look substantially less material than the cons. "Keeping the bad guys out" and the "good guys safe" are the substantive arguments for Surveillance, and clearly have trumped all other arguments and objections that may have been raised by those politicians in the know over recent decades. But, Snowden and others have asked, are they really the only ways to do that? And at what cost? Even President Obama mused in public (sharing some of the debate that must have been raging in secure rooms), just because we have the ability to do something, doesn't mean we should necessarily do that something (I paraphrase). The cost and convenience argument of Surveillance Capitalism weakens when the reality of surge pricing and information asymmetry is taken into consideration.

The second observation is that laying out the two sides of the argument (of the two sides of the same coin) doesn't make it any easier to come to a cold logical determination that either side is platonically right or wrong. I look at this table and feel worried and disturbed and confused and uncertain. I could make both the pro and the con argument equally convincingly I believe.

*

In 2018, at Davos, I asked Alex Karp (a key gene in the pool referenced above), "Is Edward Snowden a hero or a villain?" His answer (in a public forum)? "Both".

*

Conor Friedersdorf, of The Atlantic magazine, wrote in 2013, "We are counting on having angels in office and making ourselves vulnerable to devils". [This was a quote we referenced in Code Halos].

*

I'm reminded of the old chestnut, "if you're not thoroughly confused, you're not adequately informed".

*

So, where do we land in this great debate that Zuboff and Snowden have framed for us? A debate that may be the greatest of this generation - one whose resolution will echo down through the history ahead of us. Disciples of Orwell or Dave Eggers (I've long called The Circle the prequel to Nineteen Eighty-Four) will be clear where they stand. Members (and fans) of the Industrial-Military-Complex (especially its cyber wing) will likewise be adamant that what they're doing is right, even if an ungrateful nation doesn't see it that way. Everyone else - 90% of society - will be somewhere in the greyness between the poles of black and white.

Maybe my financial friend is right that I should worry about more important things. But maybe I'm right that there isn't anything else more important to worry about. Maybe Surveillance and Surveillance Capitalism are our new normal and we all simply have to learn to stop worrying and love (or at least tolerate) them. Maybe a great awakening is coming that will see us scream that we are not merely numbers. All I do know is that you should read both Zuboff's and Snowden's books. Blissful ignorance is no stance at all, not when some of the most important issues of humankind's very existence are being adjudicated before our very eyes. By our very fingertips.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
The Pros and Cons of Surveillance Capitalism | Cognizant

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
In time, 2019 will come to be seen as an epochal year - perhaps as significant as 1066, 1776, 1848, 1939. As in those moments of era defining history, we are at a point where the trajectory of the future is being set.

# data[].attributes.body
Mixed. Proponents of surveillance capitalism would say that obtaining info from 'users' provides convenience. Zuboff strongly argues that without privacy we are nothing. I think big tech companies need to be regulated. But the problem arises when you realise that the concept is very recent. As a result, there is a lack of legislature precedent when applying the law to these big tech companies.

# data[].attributes.body
Surveillance capitalism is both positive and negative due to power control of shared private information. It is also a mixed development as you cannot have both democracy without surveillance in society due to security. The power to determine who knows by establishing ownership rights over our personal information and defending that authority with the ability to manage crucial information systems and infrastructures is asserted.

# data[].attributes.headline
More of a mixed development not sure how to explain it.

# data[].attributes.subject
More of a mixed development not sure how to explain it.

# data[].attributes.body
Khadija

# data[].attributes.body
The rise of Facebook, Google, and Amazon are negative as its brand of surveillance capitalism is used for commercials and advertisements that target us once we search on Google for something we'd like to buy or want to know about. It takes away our privacy as mentioned by The Conversation on how we give up our privacy for convenience. Secondly, the advertisements were shown to us through surveillance capitalism shape our behavior and thinking. For instance, we see an advert on Google for something we don't need or want. Services like Google can keep showing us the same objects, at possibly a cheaper price and we'd get pressured into buying it. Thus, surveillance capitalism does modify our behaviors and thinking as supported by Zuboff.

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2019/oct/04/shoshana-zuboff-surveillance-capitalism-assault-human-automomy-digital-privacy

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
It's a beautiful day on Hampstead Heath, the last weekend of summer - parliament is still prorogued. In a festival tent at the HowtheLightGetsIn festival, Professor Shoshana Zuboff is talking about her recent book, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power. Zuboff stands on a low stage, making eye-contact with her audience. She spies someone who seems unconvinced, invites them to raise their concerns. "When this book was published in January, I left home for three weeks on the road," she says. "I'm still going."

The audience laughs. Because The Age of Surveillance Capitalism - a 700-plus page sociological analysis of the digital era - has become an epoch-defining international bestseller, drawing comparisons to revolutionary works such as Rachel Carson's Silent Spring. Naomi Klein has urged everyone to read it "as an act of digital self-defence".

It describes how global tech companies such as Google and Facebook persuaded us to give up our privacy for the sake of convenience; how personal information ("data") gathered by these companies has been used by others not only to predict our behaviour but also to influence and modify it; and how this has had disastrous consequences for democracy and freedom. This is the "surveillance capitalism" of the title, which Zuboff defines as a "new economic order" and "an expropriation of critical human rights that is best understood as a coup from above".

Later, in an unglamorous spot by some parked vans, Zuboff explains why she wrote her book. She has dark eyes behind horn-rimmed glasses; abundant black curls; a low, resonant voice. She is brilliantly erudite and outlines her argument in trenchant, honed phrases, as if reading aloud. Her work on the themes of The Age of Surveillance Capitalism began as far back as the late 1970s. She was a postgraduate at Harvard, writing a doctorate on the Industrial Revolution. To earn money, she became an organisational change consultant, working in offices that were "computerising" for the first time. "They were expecting immediate productivity, growth, efficiency. But it was chaos, disaster. Crazy stuff was happening. People were saying 'My work is floating in space!'"

In 1978, Zuboff was working at the Washington Post, with linotypists who were converting to cold type. "One day I had just finished the graveyard shift, and I wandered into the National Gallery of Art, where I saw these hulking, dirty, dark entities in the pit of a bright white amphitheatre." It was the Voltri-Bolton series by David Smith - an American sculptor who in the 1960s created sculptures from old factory machinery and debris. "I realised then the process of computerisation would be the next industrial revolution, and it would change everything - including how we think, and feel and how we create meaning. I had a notebook, and I started writing. This has been the agenda for my intellectual life since then."

Inspiration ... David Smith's
Voltri-Bolton X, and Voltri Bolton IX. Photograph: NYT

This led to Zuboff's first book In the Age of the Smart Machine: The Future of Work and Power (1988) - a startlingly prophetic analysis of how information technology would transform working lives. Long before the emergence of the internet, Zuboff argued that everything that could be translated into information would be - exchanges, events, objects - and that data streams would be used wherever possible for surveillance and control. It was followed by The Support Economy: Why Corporations Are Failing Individuals and the Next Episode of Capitalism (2002), co-authored with her husband, James Maxmin, a former CEO of companies including Laura Ashley and a Distinguished Scholar at MIT, who died in 2016.

On the strength of her first book, Zuboff became one of the first tenured women at Harvard Business School. She later became one of the youngest professors to receive an endowed chair. With her husband, Zuboff went to live in rural Maine; they raised their children, farmed deer. In 2009, their home was struck by lightning and burned to the ground. The family escaped, but lost all their possessions - books, research materials, passports. "One odd thing: when the house burned, that old notebook from DC survived." Not long after this, Zuboff began to write Surveillance Capitalism.

It is the story of the digital revolution, and how the early utopian prospects of the web darkened into "a rogue mutation of capitalism marked by concentrations of wealth, knowledge and power unprecedented in human history". Gmail was launched in 2004; Google subsequently admitted that it has scanned private correspondence for personal information. In the same year, Facebook was founded, its business model also based on the capture of and access to personal information. The metaphor Zuboff uses is one of conquest: "With so little left that could be commodified, the last virgin territory was private human experience." In 1986, 1% of the world's information was digitised. In 2013, it was 98%.

Surveillance capitalists sell certainty to business customers who would like to know with certainty what we do

It is a movement founded on predictive algorithms, mathematical calculations of human behaviour. Surveillance capitalists "sell certainty to business customers who would like to know with certainty what we do. Targeted adverts, yes, but also businesses want to know whether to sell us a mortgage, insurance, what to charge us, do we drive safely? They want to know the maximum they can extract from us in an exchange. They want to know how we will behave in order to know how to best intervene in our behaviour." The best way to make your predictions desirable to customers is to ensure they come true: "to tune and herd and shape and push us in the direction that creates the highest probability of their business success". There's no way "to dress this up as anything but behavioural modification". In 2012 and 2013, Facebook conducted "massive-scale contagion experiments" to see if they could " affect real-world emotions and behaviour, in ways that bypassed user awareness ".

There are crux points in the lives of societies and individuals. A revelation in a gallery. A cataclysmic fire, and a salvaged notebook. Zuboff argues that we are now at one more crux point: "The age of surveillance capitalism is a titanic struggle between capital and each one of us. It is a direct intervention into free will, an assault on human autonomy." It is the capture of our intimate personal details, even of our faces. "They have no right to my face, to take it when I walk down the street."

Such violations threaten our freedom, Zuboff says. "When we think about free will, philosophers talk about closing the gap between present and future. We make ourselves a promise: I'll do something with that future moment - go to a meeting, make a phone call. If we are treated as a mass of 'users', to be herded and coaxed, then this promise becomes meaningless. I am a distinctive human. I have an indelible crucible of power within me... I should decide if my face becomes data, my home, my car, my voice becomes data. It should be my choice."

Born in New England in 1951, Zuboff is the daughter of a pharmacist and a homemaker. Her maternal grandfather, Max Miller, was a self-made entrepreneur, who invented the servomechanism for the vending machine. In her youth, she "did lots of growing up in Argentina, living on the Altiplano, with people who lived very simple lives". She is passionate about the natural world; her analogies often invoke farming and the rural environment. The only time she pauses mid-sentence is when a magpie with iridescent blue feathers alights beside us. "What a beautiful bird!" Zuboff tells me that at the start of the Industrial Revolution persuading farmers to work in factories was like trying to get a deer to pull a plough. It was too incongruous, they wouldn't do it. "Then after a while, the deer took the plough. There's a brief window before social amnesia sets in."

When I ask how deliberate this all was, if Mark Zuckerberg, Larry Page and Sergey Brin were just a bunch of happy tech-utopians who accidentally opened Pandora's box, she smiles wryly. "This was world-historical wealth creation." Surveillance capitalists have "many strategies to protect themselves from the law. Lobbying, political capture, other economic methods that we associate with cartelisation." They have also claimed that the internet is a new reality with different protocols; "Larry Page has said how could Google follow any law that came into being before the internet? This is propaganda." In her talk at the festival, Zuboff dismisses another proposition, that these are innovative companies that occasionally make mistakes. "Yes, like Google Nest [Google's home security system]: 'Oh we're so sorry, we put a microphone in the Nest surveillance system and we forgot! We forgot to put it in the schematic." (This story broke in February, and Google described its failure to put the microphone on tech specs as "an error".)

I felt I was up against the clock of social amnesia, psychic numbing - people were losing their sense of astonishment

What about Zuckerberg's claims that "privacy is no longer a social norm", or the advice of Eric Schmidt (Google CEO, 2001-2011): "If you have something that you don't want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn't be doing it in the first place?" Zuboff has, of course, heard this line a thousand times. It has been repeated not only by surveillance capitalists, but also by governments advocating the mass surveillance of civilians. She is brisk in response: "I tell people, if you have nothing to hide then you are nothing. This isn't about Hayekian individuality, libertarianism - it's a historical process of individuation that has developed hand in hand with political freedom and democracy." It's also not Orwell, not Big Brother. "There's no one coming to take anyone away to the Gulag. It doesn't want to kill us. It just wants to move us in the direction of its predictions and get the data." Although, "in China we see the attempt to annex these technologies to the repressive state".

Some have also proposed that "choice architecture" - nudges and coaxes - can be societally beneficial, if used wisely. Proponents of this argument include Cass Sunstein and Richard Thaler (co-authors of Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness). Zuboff disagrees vigorously. "Once you legitimate the ex-machina nudge it is intolerable. It is an act of power over the other - rather than educating or alerting. Nudging is paternalistic. Behavioural economists such as Thaler legitimated the nudge, empowered and increased the audacity of the surveillance capitalists. Thaler got the Nobel prize."

Why does she care so much? "I gave up a lot of time to write this book, over many years," she says. "I gave up time with my husband, my children. I gave up my health. Everything I had I gave, because I felt I was up against the clock of social amnesia, psychic numbing - people were losing their sense of astonishment." Yes, she agrees that "Snowden made a huge contribution to waking people up. The tech companies were implicated." Leaked documents showed the NSA collecting data from Yahoo, Google, Facebook and Microsoft. And the Cambridge Analytica scandal? "Carole Cadwalladr's work is heroic. And Chris Wylie [the Cambridge Analytica whistleblower] revealed that every aspect of Cambridge Analytica's operations was simply mimicking a day in the life of a surveillance capitalist." Instead of behavioural modification for commercial ends, the ends become political? Voting instead of buying? "Democracy is on the ropes in the UK, US, many other countries. Not in small measure because of the operations of surveillance capitalism."

Every time Zuboff speaks in public, she asks the audience: "What are the concerns that bring you here?" People call out words: privacy; dystopia; control; monopoly; manipulation; intrusion; exploitation; democracy; misinformation; fear; freedom; power; rebellion; slavery; resistance. Everywhere the words are virtually the same. What can be done? People object, but nothing happens. Doesn't that lead to lassitude? "Regulation," she says, firmly. "This is what the tech companies fear most. We say that markets that trade in human futures are illegal - like the slave trade was made illegal." Then we design "programs as a closed loop" and "reclaim the idea that we can have the digital without surveillance capitalism". This will require the "indignation" of citizens, journalists, scholars and law-makers. "Surveillance capitalism has had 20 years unimpeded by law. But it is very young."

The following day Zuboff is to give another speech, asking another audience: "What are the concerns that bring you here?" like a reclaimed version of that old Facebook question: "What's on your mind?"

Zuboff has now been on the road for nine months. The alternative, doing nothing and being "subsumed in unadulterated power" is not an option for her. "We are not simply users. We are much used. We have to awaken to our shared future."

The Age of Surveillance Capitalism is published by Profile (£10.99). To order a copy go to guardianbookshop.com or call 020-3176 3837. Free UK p&p over £15, online orders only. Phone orders min. p&p of £1.99.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Shoshana Zuboff: 'Surveillance capitalism is an assault on human autonomy'

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
What began as advertising is now a threat to freedom and democracy argues the author and scholar. Time to wake up - and fight for a different digital future

# data[].attributes.body
Zuboff argues that “The age of surveillance capitalism is a titanic struggle between capital and each one of us. It is a direct intervention into free will, an assault on human autonomy.”, furthermore illustrating how surveliiane capitalising allows tech giants to profit off each individuals data by utuilizing various mathematical algorithims that essentially predict human behaviour to talior certain products that can alter our way of thinking. my stance is i am not for or against it.

# data[].attributes.body
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2019/oct/04/shoshana-zuboff-surveillance-capitalism-assault-human-automomy-digital-privacy

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2019/jan/20/shoshana-zuboff-age-of-surveillance-capitalism-google-facebook

https://theconversation.com/explainer-what-is-surveillance-capitalism-and-how-does-it-shape-our-economy-119158

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
It's a beautiful day on Hampstead Heath, the last weekend of summer - parliament is still prorogued. In a festival tent at the HowtheLightGetsIn festival, Professor Shoshana Zuboff is talking about her recent book, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power. Zuboff stands on a low stage, making eye-contact with her audience. She spies someone who seems unconvinced, invites them to raise their concerns. "When this book was published in January, I left home for three weeks on the road," she says. "I'm still going."

The audience laughs. Because The Age of Surveillance Capitalism - a 700-plus page sociological analysis of the digital era - has become an epoch-defining international bestseller, drawing comparisons to revolutionary works such as Rachel Carson's Silent Spring. Naomi Klein has urged everyone to read it "as an act of digital self-defence".

It describes how global tech companies such as Google and Facebook persuaded us to give up our privacy for the sake of convenience; how personal information ("data") gathered by these companies has been used by others not only to predict our behaviour but also to influence and modify it; and how this has had disastrous consequences for democracy and freedom. This is the "surveillance capitalism" of the title, which Zuboff defines as a "new economic order" and "an expropriation of critical human rights that is best understood as a coup from above".

Later, in an unglamorous spot by some parked vans, Zuboff explains why she wrote her book. She has dark eyes behind horn-rimmed glasses; abundant black curls; a low, resonant voice. She is brilliantly erudite and outlines her argument in trenchant, honed phrases, as if reading aloud. Her work on the themes of The Age of Surveillance Capitalism began as far back as the late 1970s. She was a postgraduate at Harvard, writing a doctorate on the Industrial Revolution. To earn money, she became an organisational change consultant, working in offices that were "computerising" for the first time. "They were expecting immediate productivity, growth, efficiency. But it was chaos, disaster. Crazy stuff was happening. People were saying 'My work is floating in space!'"

In 1978, Zuboff was working at the Washington Post, with linotypists who were converting to cold type. "One day I had just finished the graveyard shift, and I wandered into the National Gallery of Art, where I saw these hulking, dirty, dark entities in the pit of a bright white amphitheatre." It was the Voltri-Bolton series by David Smith - an American sculptor who in the 1960s created sculptures from old factory machinery and debris. "I realised then the process of computerisation would be the next industrial revolution, and it would change everything - including how we think, and feel and how we create meaning. I had a notebook, and I started writing. This has been the agenda for my intellectual life since then."

Inspiration ... David Smith's
Voltri-Bolton X, and Voltri Bolton IX. Photograph: NYT

This led to Zuboff's first book In the Age of the Smart Machine: The Future of Work and Power (1988) - a startlingly prophetic analysis of how information technology would transform working lives. Long before the emergence of the internet, Zuboff argued that everything that could be translated into information would be - exchanges, events, objects - and that data streams would be used wherever possible for surveillance and control. It was followed by The Support Economy: Why Corporations Are Failing Individuals and the Next Episode of Capitalism (2002), co-authored with her husband, James Maxmin, a former CEO of companies including Laura Ashley and a Distinguished Scholar at MIT, who died in 2016.

On the strength of her first book, Zuboff became one of the first tenured women at Harvard Business School. She later became one of the youngest professors to receive an endowed chair. With her husband, Zuboff went to live in rural Maine; they raised their children, farmed deer. In 2009, their home was struck by lightning and burned to the ground. The family escaped, but lost all their possessions - books, research materials, passports. "One odd thing: when the house burned, that old notebook from DC survived." Not long after this, Zuboff began to write Surveillance Capitalism.

It is the story of the digital revolution, and how the early utopian prospects of the web darkened into "a rogue mutation of capitalism marked by concentrations of wealth, knowledge and power unprecedented in human history". Gmail was launched in 2004; Google subsequently admitted that it has scanned private correspondence for personal information. In the same year, Facebook was founded, its business model also based on the capture of and access to personal information. The metaphor Zuboff uses is one of conquest: "With so little left that could be commodified, the last virgin territory was private human experience." In 1986, 1% of the world's information was digitised. In 2013, it was 98%.

Surveillance capitalists sell certainty to business customers who would like to know with certainty what we do

It is a movement founded on predictive algorithms, mathematical calculations of human behaviour. Surveillance capitalists "sell certainty to business customers who would like to know with certainty what we do. Targeted adverts, yes, but also businesses want to know whether to sell us a mortgage, insurance, what to charge us, do we drive safely? They want to know the maximum they can extract from us in an exchange. They want to know how we will behave in order to know how to best intervene in our behaviour." The best way to make your predictions desirable to customers is to ensure they come true: "to tune and herd and shape and push us in the direction that creates the highest probability of their business success". There's no way "to dress this up as anything but behavioural modification". In 2012 and 2013, Facebook conducted "massive-scale contagion experiments" to see if they could " affect real-world emotions and behaviour, in ways that bypassed user awareness ".

There are crux points in the lives of societies and individuals. A revelation in a gallery. A cataclysmic fire, and a salvaged notebook. Zuboff argues that we are now at one more crux point: "The age of surveillance capitalism is a titanic struggle between capital and each one of us. It is a direct intervention into free will, an assault on human autonomy." It is the capture of our intimate personal details, even of our faces. "They have no right to my face, to take it when I walk down the street."

Such violations threaten our freedom, Zuboff says. "When we think about free will, philosophers talk about closing the gap between present and future. We make ourselves a promise: I'll do something with that future moment - go to a meeting, make a phone call. If we are treated as a mass of 'users', to be herded and coaxed, then this promise becomes meaningless. I am a distinctive human. I have an indelible crucible of power within me... I should decide if my face becomes data, my home, my car, my voice becomes data. It should be my choice."

Born in New England in 1951, Zuboff is the daughter of a pharmacist and a homemaker. Her maternal grandfather, Max Miller, was a self-made entrepreneur, who invented the servomechanism for the vending machine. In her youth, she "did lots of growing up in Argentina, living on the Altiplano, with people who lived very simple lives". She is passionate about the natural world; her analogies often invoke farming and the rural environment. The only time she pauses mid-sentence is when a magpie with iridescent blue feathers alights beside us. "What a beautiful bird!" Zuboff tells me that at the start of the Industrial Revolution persuading farmers to work in factories was like trying to get a deer to pull a plough. It was too incongruous, they wouldn't do it. "Then after a while, the deer took the plough. There's a brief window before social amnesia sets in."

When I ask how deliberate this all was, if Mark Zuckerberg, Larry Page and Sergey Brin were just a bunch of happy tech-utopians who accidentally opened Pandora's box, she smiles wryly. "This was world-historical wealth creation." Surveillance capitalists have "many strategies to protect themselves from the law. Lobbying, political capture, other economic methods that we associate with cartelisation." They have also claimed that the internet is a new reality with different protocols; "Larry Page has said how could Google follow any law that came into being before the internet? This is propaganda." In her talk at the festival, Zuboff dismisses another proposition, that these are innovative companies that occasionally make mistakes. "Yes, like Google Nest [Google's home security system]: 'Oh we're so sorry, we put a microphone in the Nest surveillance system and we forgot! We forgot to put it in the schematic." (This story broke in February, and Google described its failure to put the microphone on tech specs as "an error".)

I felt I was up against the clock of social amnesia, psychic numbing - people were losing their sense of astonishment

What about Zuckerberg's claims that "privacy is no longer a social norm", or the advice of Eric Schmidt (Google CEO, 2001-2011): "If you have something that you don't want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn't be doing it in the first place?" Zuboff has, of course, heard this line a thousand times. It has been repeated not only by surveillance capitalists, but also by governments advocating the mass surveillance of civilians. She is brisk in response: "I tell people, if you have nothing to hide then you are nothing. This isn't about Hayekian individuality, libertarianism - it's a historical process of individuation that has developed hand in hand with political freedom and democracy." It's also not Orwell, not Big Brother. "There's no one coming to take anyone away to the Gulag. It doesn't want to kill us. It just wants to move us in the direction of its predictions and get the data." Although, "in China we see the attempt to annex these technologies to the repressive state".

Some have also proposed that "choice architecture" - nudges and coaxes - can be societally beneficial, if used wisely. Proponents of this argument include Cass Sunstein and Richard Thaler (co-authors of Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness). Zuboff disagrees vigorously. "Once you legitimate the ex-machina nudge it is intolerable. It is an act of power over the other - rather than educating or alerting. Nudging is paternalistic. Behavioural economists such as Thaler legitimated the nudge, empowered and increased the audacity of the surveillance capitalists. Thaler got the Nobel prize."

Why does she care so much? "I gave up a lot of time to write this book, over many years," she says. "I gave up time with my husband, my children. I gave up my health. Everything I had I gave, because I felt I was up against the clock of social amnesia, psychic numbing - people were losing their sense of astonishment." Yes, she agrees that "Snowden made a huge contribution to waking people up. The tech companies were implicated." Leaked documents showed the NSA collecting data from Yahoo, Google, Facebook and Microsoft. And the Cambridge Analytica scandal? "Carole Cadwalladr's work is heroic. And Chris Wylie [the Cambridge Analytica whistleblower] revealed that every aspect of Cambridge Analytica's operations was simply mimicking a day in the life of a surveillance capitalist." Instead of behavioural modification for commercial ends, the ends become political? Voting instead of buying? "Democracy is on the ropes in the UK, US, many other countries. Not in small measure because of the operations of surveillance capitalism."

Every time Zuboff speaks in public, she asks the audience: "What are the concerns that bring you here?" People call out words: privacy; dystopia; control; monopoly; manipulation; intrusion; exploitation; democracy; misinformation; fear; freedom; power; rebellion; slavery; resistance. Everywhere the words are virtually the same. What can be done? People object, but nothing happens. Doesn't that lead to lassitude? "Regulation," she says, firmly. "This is what the tech companies fear most. We say that markets that trade in human futures are illegal - like the slave trade was made illegal." Then we design "programs as a closed loop" and "reclaim the idea that we can have the digital without surveillance capitalism". This will require the "indignation" of citizens, journalists, scholars and law-makers. "Surveillance capitalism has had 20 years unimpeded by law. But it is very young."

The following day Zuboff is to give another speech, asking another audience: "What are the concerns that bring you here?" like a reclaimed version of that old Facebook question: "What's on your mind?"

Zuboff has now been on the road for nine months. The alternative, doing nothing and being "subsumed in unadulterated power" is not an option for her. "We are not simply users. We are much used. We have to awaken to our shared future."

The Age of Surveillance Capitalism is published by Profile (£10.99). To order a copy go to guardianbookshop.com or call 020-3176 3837. Free UK p&p over £15, online orders only. Phone orders min. p&p of £1.99.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Shoshana Zuboff: 'Surveillance capitalism is an assault on human autonomy'

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
What began as advertising is now a threat to freedom and democracy argues the author and scholar. Time to wake up - and fight for a different digital future

# data[].attributes.body
surveillance capitalism is both good and bad.

while many people might suggest that surveillance capitalism is a preach of freedom, privacy, and autonomy in favor of large tech companies, that is absolutely right. the same tech companies use surveillance capitalism to enhance user experiences and offer better services based on the user's previous data. so basically surveillance capitalism is negative and positive, personally, I think it is mixed.
Explainer: what is surveillance capitalism and how does it shape our economy? (theconversation.com)

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
I recently purchased a bedroom bundle (mattress, bed base, pillows and sheets) from a well-known Australian startup for my son, who has flown the nest. Now I'm swamped with Google and Facebook ads for beds and bedding. The week before it was puffer jackets.

Ever wonder why and how this happens? The answer is surveillance capitalism.

Surveillance capitalism describes a market driven process where the commodity for sale is your personal data, and the capture and production of this data relies on mass surveillance of the internet. This activity is often carried out by companies that provide us with free online services, such as search engines (Google) and social media platforms (Facebook).

These companies collect and scrutinise our online behaviours (likes, dislikes, searches, social networks, purchases) to produce data that can be further used for commercial purposes. And it's often done without us understanding the full extent of the surveillance.

The term surveillance capitalism was coined by academic Shoshana Zuboff in 2014. She suggests that surveillance capitalism depends on:

...the global architecture of computer mediation [...] [which] produces a distributed and mostly uncontested new expression of power that I christen: "Big Other".

Read more: Is it time to regulate targeted ads and the web giants that profit from them?

The big data economy

The late 20th century has seen our economy move away from mass production lines in factories to become progressively more reliant on knowledge. Surveillance capitalism, on the other hand, uses a business model based on the digital world, and is reliant on "big data" to make money.

The data used in this process is often collected from the same groups of people who will ultimately be its targets. For instance, Google collects personal online data to target us with ads, and Facebook is likely selling our data to organisations who want us to vote for them or to vaccinate our babies.

Third-party data brokers, as opposed to companies that hold the data like Google or Facebook, are also on-selling our data. These companies buy data from a variety of sources, collate information about individuals or groups of individuals, then sell it.

Smaller companies are also cashing in on this. Last year, HealthEngine, a medical appointment booking app, was found to be sharing clients' personal information with Perth lawyers particularly interested in workplace injuries or vehicle accidents.

Cambridge Analytica was a wake-up call

Last year's Cambridge Analytica revelations highlighted the extent to which internet companies surveil online activity. Cambridge Analytica's actions broke Facebook's own rules by collecting and on-selling data under the pretence of academic research. Their dealings may have violated election law in the United States.

Despite the questionable nature of Cambridge Analytics' actions, the bigger players and leading actors in surveillance capitalism, Facebook and Google, are still legally amassing as much information as they can. That includes information about their users, their users' online friends, and even their users' offline friends (known as shadow profiling). A shadow profile is a profile created about someone who hasn't signed up to particular social platform, but might have some data stored about them because they have interacted with someone who has. Platforms make huge profits from this.

In this sense, Cambridge Analytica was a small player in the big data economy.

Read more: Big brother is watching: how new technologies are changing police surveillance

Where surveillance capitalism came from

Surveillance capitalism practices were first consolidated at Google. They used data extraction procedures and packaged users' data to create new markets for this commodity.

Currently, the biggest "Big Other" actors are Google, Amazon, Facebook and Apple. Together, they collect and control unparalleled quantities of data about our behaviours, which they turn into products and services.

This has resulted in astonishing business growth for these companies. Indeed, Amazon, Microsoft, Alphabet (Google), Apple and Facebook are now ranked in the top six of the world's biggest companies by market capitalisation.

Google, for instance, processes an average of 40,000 searches per second, 3.5 billion per day and 1.2 trillion per year. Its parent company, Alphabet, was recently valued at US$822 billion.

Sources of data are increasing

Newly available data sources have dramatically increased the quantity and variety of data available. Our expanding sensor-based society now includes wearables, smart home devices, drones, connected toys and automated travel. Sensors such as microphones, cameras, accelerometers, and temperature and motion sensors add to an ever expanding list of our activities (data) that can be collected and commodified.

Commonly used wearables like smart watches and fitness trackers, for example, are becoming part of everyday health care practices. Our activities and biometric data can be stored and used to interpret our health and fitness status.

Shutterstock

Read more: How artificial intelligence systems could threaten democracy

This same data is of great value to health insurance providers. In the US, some insurance providers require a data feed from the policyholder's device in order to qualify for insurance cover.

Connected toys are another rapidly growing market niche associated with surveillance capitalism. There are educational benefits from children playing with these toys, as well as the possibility of drawing children away from screens towards more physical, interactive and social play. But major data breaches around these toys have already occurred, marking childrens' data as another valuable commodity.

In her latest book, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, Zubboff suggests that our emerging sensor based society will make surveillance capitalism more embedded and pervasive in our lives.
Correction: This article has been updated to correct the number of searches conducted on Google each second. The correct number is 40,000.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Explainer: what is surveillance capitalism and how does it shape our economy?

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
I recently purchased a bedroom bundle (mattress, bed base, pillows and sheets) from a well-known Australian startup for my son, who has flown the nest. Now I'm swamped with Google and Facebook ads for beds and bedding. The week before it was puffer jackets. Ever wonder why and how this happens?