Why Surveillance Capitalism is not an end game or model!

“The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power”

So I took this one for the team, and read every single page of the near 700 pages. It is a slog, even for me as a massive advocate of privacy, PII, identity, security, trust and data.

Massive respect to Shoshana Zuboff for 15 years of thinking, research, dedication and writing on and to the topic. This is half of a life’s dedication. Yes I wrote and published “My Digital Footprint — where your privacy is someone else’s business model” 10 years ago and whilst we now have lots of proof now, the theory has not moved on.

There is a lot written on this book already. If you want a summary of Shoshana work these are some of these better write ups. WIRED, FT, ZDNET, The Guardian, Harvard, Linux Journal, The Verge, Philosophical. For those who want a few videos try these TWIT, Democracy Now

My thinking

I am critical of this book, and can only assume that some who have written the summaries have not read the book, or indeed have not read a lot about this aspect of the digital market. Indeed, some may be too young to remember 1993 and the emergence of the web. I do doubt they have being reading on this since say Resisting the Virtual Life 1995 or Being Digital…