Shoshana Zuboff on Surveillance Capitalism’s Threat to Democracy
The Harvard Business School professor discusses her new book
By Noah Kulwin
On February 4, Google proudly announced that its Nest Secure home anti-intrusion device would now support its voice-activated Google Assistant service. There was a catch, however: No one knew that the Nest Secure actually had a microphone inside it. Google claims the microphone “was never intended to be a secret” and “has never been turned on,” but it’s hard to shake the feeling that hidden mics are a natural step for Silicon Valley giants intent on collecting as much data as possible, no matter the cost to user privacy.
This episode is a perfect encapsulation of the digital threat outlined in a new book by tech critic and Harvard Business School professor Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power. First published as an essay in a German publication in 2014, what Zuboff describes amounts to a new economic logic hatched in corporate America that aims to extract staggering value from users’ private lives. Cataloguing a dizzying array of sensors and invasive software, Zuboff sketches a vision of the economic future in which companies race to collect data in pursuit of Facebook- or Google-like profits.
