THE TOP 10 SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLER
Surveillance Capitalism: A new phase in economic history in which
private companies and governments track your every move with the
goal of predicting and controlling your behaviour. Under
surveillance capitalism you are not the customer or even the
product: you are the raw material.
Shoshana Zuboff has been called 'the true prophet of the information age' by the Financial Times for her ground-breaking book, In the Age of the Smart Machine. She is now the Charles Edward Wilson Professor Emerita at Harvard Business School as well as Faculty Associate at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard Law School. In 2006, strategy+business magazine named her one of the eleven most original business thinkers in the world.
From the very first page I was consumed with an overwhelming
imperative: everyone needs to read this book as an act of digital
self-defense. With tremendous lucidity and moral courage, Zuboff
demonstrates not only how our minds are being mined for data but
also how they are being rapidly and radically changed in the
process. The hour is late and much has been lost already - but as
we learn in these indispensable pages, there is still hope for
emancipation
*Naomi Klein*
A chilling exposé of the business model that underpins the digital
world ... a striking and illuminating book. A fellow reader
remarked to me that it reminded him of Thomas Piketty's magnum
opus, Capital in the Twenty-First Century, in that it opens one's
eyes to things we ought to have noticed, but hadn't
*Observer*
This is one of those books. It will change the way you view the
world.
*Rick O'Shea*
The Age of Surveillance Capitalism is a crash course in the kinds
of conversations we should have been having 20 years ago.
*New Scientist*
Zuboff's disturbing, galvanizing The Age of Surveillance Capitalism
deserves every comparison that it's received to Rachel Carson's
Silent Spring - another masterwork that laid out, with
unforgettable clarity, the degradation of ordinary life held
captive to profit-seeking interests.
*New Yorker books of the year*
A bold, important book ... Combining in-depth technical
understanding and a broad, humanistic scope, Zuboff has written
what may prove to be the first definitive account of the economic -
and thus social and political - condition of our age.
*Guardian*
Groundbreaking, magisterial ... unmissable
*FT*
Das Kapital of the digital age
*The Times*
Comprehensive and impassioned ... an important book
*Sunday Times*
It's quite possible that the single most important book about
politics, economics, culture and society in this century is
Shoshana Zuboff's The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for
a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power. She explains with far
more power than anyone has done before the emergence of a whole new
form of capitalism based on the expropriation of the personal data
we freely give to vast corporations. It's the Das Kapital for our
times.
*Irish Times*
Groundbreaking ... Aiming to apply Marx's account of surplus value
in a time when capital is accumulated through knowledge-based
technology, she has given us an illuminating critical perspective
on the regime of surveillance under which we all now live
*New Statesman*
An exceptional and necessary book about the information
civilisation we have become
*Literary Review*
[It] will surely become a pivotal work in defining, understanding
and exposing this surreptitious exploitation of our data and,
increasingly, our free will ... essential
*Irish Times*
An intensively researched, engagingly written chronicle of
surveillance capitalism's origins and its deleterious prospects for
our society ... This is the rare book that we should trust to lead
us down the long hard road of understanding
*New York Times*
Extraordinarily intelligent ... Absorbing Zuboff's methodical
determination, the way she pieces together sundry examples into
this comprehensive work of scholarship and synthesis, requires
patience, but the rewards are considerable - a heightened sense of
awareness, and a deeper appreciation of what's at stake
*New York Times*
This book's major contribution is to give a name to what's
happening, to put it in cultural and historical perspective, and to
ask us to pause long enough to think about the future and how it
might be different from today
*WSJ*
Original ... it arrives at a crucial moment, when the public and
its elected representatives are at last grappling with the
extraordinary power of digital media and the companies that control
it. Like another recent masterwork of economic analysis, Thomas
Piketty's 2013 Capital in the Twenty-First Century, the book
challenges assumptions, raises uncomfortable questions about the
present and future, and stakes out ground for a necessary and
overdue debate
*LARB*
I will make a guarantee: Assuming we survive to tell the tale, The
Age of Surveillance Capitalism has a high probability of joining
the likes Adam Smith's The Wealth of Natiions and Max Weber's
Economy and Society as defining social-economics texts of modern
times. It is not a 'quick read;' it is to be savored and re-read
and discussed with colleagues and friends. No zippy one-liners from
me, except to almost literally beg you to read/ingest this book
*Tom Peters, author of In Search of Excellence*
The Age of Surveillance Capitalism is brilliant and essential ... a
masterpiece of rare conceptual daring, beautifully written and
deeply urgent
*Robert B. Reich, author of The Common Good and Saving Capitalism:
For the Many, Not the Few*
The defining challenge for the future of the market economy is the
concentration of data, knowledge, and surveillance power. Not just
our privacy but our individuality is at stake, and this very
readable and thought-provoking book alerts us to these existential
dangers. Highly recommended
*Daron Acemoglu, author of Why Nations Fail*
Zuboff's expansive, erudite, deeply-researched exploration of
digital futures elucidates the norms and hidden terminal goals of
information-intensive industries. Zuboff's book is the information
industry's Silent Spring
*Chris Hoofnagle, University of California, Berkeley*
In the future, if people still read books, they will view this as
the classic study of how everything changed. The Age of
Surveillance Capitalism is a masterpiece that stunningly reveals
the essence of twenty-first-century society, and offers a dire
warning about technology gone awry that we ignore at our peril.
Shoshana Zuboff has somehow escaped from the fishbowl in which we
all now live, and introduced to us the concept of water. A work of
penetrating intellect, this is also a deeply human book about what
is becoming, as it relentlessly demonstrates, a dangerously inhuman
time
*Kevin Werbach, The Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania, and
author of The Blockchain and The New Architecture of Trust*
A panoramic exploration of one of the most urgent issues of our
times, Zuboff reinterprets contemporary capitalism through the
prism of the digital revolution, producing a book of immense
ambition and erudition. Zuboff is one of our most prescient and
profound thinkers on the rise of the digital. In an age of inane
Twitter soundbites and narcissistic Facebook posts, Zuboff's
serious scholarship is great cause for celebration
*Andrew Keen, author of How to Fix the Future*
Shoshana Zuboff has produced the most provocative compelling moral
framework thus far for understanding the new realities of our
digital environment and its anti-democratic threats. From now on,
all serious writings on the internet and society will have to take
into account The Age of Surveillance Capitalism.
*Joseph Turow, Robert Lewis Shayon Chair Professor, Annenberg
School, University of Pennsylvania*
If a book's importance is gauged by how effectively it describes
the world we're in, and how much potential it has to change said
world, then in my view it's easily the most important book to be
published this century. It's really this generation's Das
Kapital.
*The Guardian*
Selected as one of the 100 best books of the 21st century ... An
agenda-setting book that is devastating about the extent to which
big tech sets out to manipulate us for profit.
*The Guardian*
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