Information, Surveillance, and Capitalism

Abstract

Information economics has become a major branch of the discipline, but economists have not always agreed on how information operates in the economy. This paper starts with the debates over information stretching back to the 1930s, follows the rise of a neoclassical information economics tradition, and brings to bear recent critiques of information from a surveillance perspective. In particular it engages with the claims of Shoshana Zuboff on the rise of surveillance capitalism, unpacking and critiquing her use of this concept. It takes a special look at her intellectual debt to Émile Durkheim. Zuboff sees surveillance capitalism as a recent aberration in capitalism's otherwise successful development, whereas this essay argues that it is both much more deeply embedded in capitalism historically and that her essentially functionalist, humanistic perspective does not fully account for the workings of subjectivity and power in surveillance.