Think of it like a shop where every shelf quietly counts what you pick up, how long you hold it and what you put back, and then sells that tally to someone else. That, in plain terms, is how Shoshana Zuboff describes surveillance capitalism. She is professor emerita at Harvard Business School and the author of The Age of Surveillance Capitalism.
Where it started
Zuboff told Democracy Now! in 2019 that the idea was first put into practice at Google around 2000 and 2001, in online targeted advertising, while the company was in what she called financial emergency after the dotcom bust. Her point is that the pattern did not stay there. The same logic, she said, moved from Google to Facebook, across the tech sector and then into almost every other part of the economy.
Her definition is blunt. Private human experience, she says, is claimed as free raw material and turned into behavioral data. Computing power turns that data into predictions of what people will do now, soon and later. Those predictions are sold to business customers in what she calls a marketplace for human futures.
More than advertising
In a Guardian interview later that year, Zuboff said the buyers want more than targeted ads. They want to know whether to sell someone a mortgage or insurance, what to charge, whether a person drives safely. And the surest way to make a prediction come true, she argued, is to nudge people toward it. “There’s no way to dress this up as anything but behavioural modification,” she said, as the Guardian quoted her.
The Guardian pointed to a few markers along the way. Gmail launched in 2004, and Google later admitted it had scanned private correspondence for personal information. Facebook was founded the same year. In 1986, 1% of the world’s information was digitised. By 2013 the figure was 98%. In 2012 and 2013 Facebook ran large-scale experiments to test whether it could shift real-world emotions and behaviour without users noticing.
What Zuboff wants changed
The practical upshot, in her telling, is that the problem is not the technology itself. She called the idea that digital tools can only work this way “one of the big lies.” Digital technology, she said, could still be empowering. What needs to be confronted is the economic logic that took it over, and a single company is the wrong target. In her words, scrutiny of Facebook was welcome but only “the beginning, not the end.”
She also rejects the old line that free services make users the product. In her account, people are the free source of raw material, much as elephant tusks are the prize for a poacher, and the real products are the predictions built from that material.
Her warning is not about a Big Brother. “It doesn’t want to kill us,” she told the Guardian. “It just wants to move us in the direction of its predictions and get the data.”
Sources
- Age of Surveillance Capitalism: “We Thought We Were Searching Google, But Google Was Searching Us” | Democracy Now!
- Shoshana Zuboff: ‘Surveillance capitalism is an assault on human autonomy’ | Society books | The Guardian
