These data are then computed and packaged as prediction products and sold into behavioral futures markets - business customers with a commercial interest in knowing what we will do now, soon, and later. ZUBOFF: I define surveillance capitalism as the unilateral claiming of private human experience as free raw material for translation into behavioral data. GAZETTE: What are some of the ways we might not realize that we are losing our autonomy to Facebook, Google, and others? The opportunities to align supply and demand around the needs of individuals were overtaken by a new economic logic that offered a fast track to monetization. However, the early indications were that the people framing that first generation of e-commerce were more preoccupied with tracking cookies and attracting eyeballs for advertising than they were in the historic opportunity they faced.įor a time I thought this was part of the trial and error of a profound structural transformation, but, certainly by 2007, I understood that this was actually a new variant of capitalism that was taking hold of the digital milieu. I discussed how we finally had the technology to align the forces of supply and demand. ZUBOFF: In my 2002 book, “The Support Economy,” I looked at the challenges to capitalism in shifting from a mass to an individual-oriented structure of consumption. When did you start worrying that the tech giants driving it were becoming more interested in exploiting us than serving us? GAZETTE: The digital revolution began with great promise. The Gazette recently interviewed Zuboff about her belief that surveillance capitalism, a term she coined in 2014, is undermining personal autonomy and eroding democracy - and the ways she says society can fight back. In her new book, “The Age of Surveillance Capitalism,” Zuboff offers a disturbing picture of how Silicon Valley and other corporations are mining users’ information to predict and shape their behavior. But Shoshana Zuboff, professor emerita at Harvard Business School, warns that their lights, bells, and whistles have made us blind and deaf to the ways high-tech giants exploit our personal data for their own ends. The continuing advances of the digital revolution can be dazzling.

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