The book The Age of Surveillance Capitalism (2019), by Professor Emerita Shoshana Zuboff, is a fundamental analysis of the power of data-mining technologies. Published at the height of the Cambridge Analytica scandal, the book emerged as a response to the collusion between corporations like Google and Facebook and government agencies to commodify human experience.
Zuboff documents in the book how, since 2001, technology companies have developed mechanisms to capture and predict behavior through algorithms, transforming privacy into a raw material. Defining this system as surveillance capitalism, she reveals its colonial logic: the appropriation of personal data as an unlimited resource for social control and oligarchic profit.
The Age of Surveillance Capitalism is situated in a context where three key factors converge:
- The expansion of cloud computing after 9/11, linked to US national security.
- The proliferation of IoT (Internet of Things) devices that monitor daily habits.
- The growing reliance on algorithmic interfaces for political and public decisions.
The author explains how behavioral instrumentalism shapes modern societies. Platforms like Amazon and TikTok use browsing data to influence purchases, opinions, and desires, defining new standards of “normality.” The result is a dystopia where individual futures are prescribed by corporate prediction tunnels. In response, technological sovereignty and the right to be forgotten must be central. Surveillance capitalism, in fact, denies the principles of horizontality and transparency that should form the basis of the resistance proposed by Zuboff, aligning itself with the promotion of free software alternatives, the development of coercive regulations, and critical literacy regarding devices and the internet.