The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power by Shoshana ZuboffMy rating: 3 of 5 stars
When I graduated from college and started my first full time job, I celebrated by buying a book. No surprise. I chose one that was new, at the time, and intellectual, and related to my job choosing technologies for business optimization and general use. My choice of three decades ago – Zuboff’s first book “In The Age Of The Smart Machine: The Future Of Work And Power”. It was interesting to me, but nothing very surprising. Zuboff wrote with a professor’s eye to detail, making more arguments than I normally see to make her cases. I found her style of writing started with the bones of a popular book but added academic detail uncommon in books I normally read.
Fast forward to the end of my career, and I see Zuboff has released another large tome. Here, I had the benefit of the audio version as well as the hardback to refer to. Her style remains similar to her earlier book – develop some arguments and provide extensive evidence and examples to make her points. I don’t recall if her first book was written to sound an alarm on automation, but this one absolutely is written to sound alarms, this time against technology companies abuse of privacy rights. Zuboff dives into the recent history of technology companies using more and more personal data to shift power from citizens to the companies. Main boogeyman here is Google, but after developing her story with Google, she adds similar stories of corporate overreach from Microsoft, Facebook and others. While I recall her first book reading more as If aimed at technologists to persuade them to fix their own problems, this one seems more aimed at prompting a political response. The outlook here is dire, and I didn’t get a lot of hopeful solutions from the reading. For a deep take on the issues of companies using personal and behavioral data on a massive scale to modify the way people think and act, this is an excellent start. And there’s a massive footnote section!
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