The Age of Surveillance Capitalism by Shoshana Zuboff, 2019, Excerpts
Power
was once identified with the ownership of the means of production, but it is
now identified with ownership of the means of behavioral modification that is
Big Other. Thanks to Big Other’s capabilities, instrumentarian power reduces
human experience to measurable observable behavior while remaining steadfastly
indifferent to the meaning of that experience.
Big
Other does not care what we think, feel, or do as long as its millions,
billions, and trillions of sensate, actuating, computational eyes and ears can
observe, render, datafy, and instrumentalize the vast reservoirs of behavioral
surplus that are generated in the galactic uproar of connection and
communication.
Google
tripled its number of machine intelligence scientists in just the last few
years and has become the top contributor to the most prestigious scientific
journals—four to five times the world average in 2016. Under the regime of
surveillance capitalism, their genius is meant to storm the gates of human
experience, transforming it into data and translating it into a new market
colossus that creates wealth by predicting, influencing, and controlling human
behavior.
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