Part manifesto, part deeply researched modern history, former Harvard Business School professor Shoshana Zuboff’s book urgently examines the tech industry’s increasingly disconcerting abuse of human experience for the sake of revenue. While barons of past industries at least relied upon and compensated workers then rewarded consumers, Zuboff argues that companies like Google and Facebook profit from and sometimes change their users’ behavior while actually working on behalf of someone else, especially advertisers. In a moment when phrases like “the attention economy” fail to adequately summarize the public’s tenuous relationship to Big Tech, “surveillance capitalism” and Zuboff’s evocation of “Big Other” (a play on “big brother”) entered the lexicon with an appropriate note of menace.
Buy now: The Age of Surveillance Capitalism