Abstract
Critical Theory in <i>The Age of Surveillance Capitalism</i>: How to Regulate the Production and Use of Personal Information in the Digital Age
Highlights
The Age of Surveillance Capitalism is a landmark text for many reasons (Zuboff 2019)
Zuboff coins a series of new concepts—uncontract, behavioral surplus, predictive markets, division of learning, shadow texts—which are systematically organized into a novel theory of value extraction and distribution in the new (“surveillance”) phase of contemporary capitalism
Her book does not seek to convince legal scholars interested in issues of privacy protection and freedom of speech to endorse specific policy proposals but, instead, to help them frame the broader question of how our freedom and dignity is protected in the age of surveillance capitalism
Summary
The Age of Surveillance Capitalism is a landmark text for many reasons (Zuboff 2019) To begin with, it is driven by the highest theoretical ambition put to the service of enlightening the general public about the fundamental threats to our freedom and dignity represented by the unprecedented and unaccountable concentrations of knowledge and power in the hands of a few capitalists. Many readers will be aware of the context in which these broad changes have happened—namely, the alliance between digital and social media companies and national security agencies formed after 9/11 They will have heard of the scandals that have sporadically burgeoned at the surface of the public’s attention, like the use of personal data to derive voting predictions by Cambridge Analytica, whose practices, as Shoshana Zuboff (2019) reveals, were not very different from the daily operation of the more established “surveillance capitalist” companies. Reading this book makes us understand that few of us are aware of the nature and scale of the operations through which such accumulation of power/ knowledge operates and its effects on our freedom
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