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Praise for The Age of Surveillance Capitalism
“The Age of Surveillance Capitalism is brilliant and essential. Shoshana Zuboff reveals capitalism's most dangerous frontier with stunning clarity: the new economic order of surveillance capitalism founded on extreme inequalities of knowledge and power. Her sweeping analysis demonstrates the unprecedented challenges to human autonomy, social solidarity, and democracy perpetrated by this rogue capitalism. Zuboff’s book finally empowers us to understand and fight these threats effectively –– a masterpiece of rare conceptual daring, beautifully written and deeply urgent.”
Robert B. Reich
Author of The Common Good and Saving Capitalism: For the Many, Not the Few | Former Secretary of Labor
“From the very first page I was consumed with an overwhelming imperative: everyone needs to read this book as act of digital self-defense. With tremendous lucidity and moral courage, Zuboff demonstrates not only how our minds are being mined for data but also how they are being rapidly and radically changed in the process. The hour is late and much has been lost already -- but as we learn in these indispensable pages, there is still hope for emancipation."
Naomi Klein
Author of This Changes Everything and No Logo | Gloria Steinem Chair in Media, Culture and Feminist Studies at Rutgers University
“Shoshana Zuboff is now finally getting universal recognition as the profound, eloquent, and erudite prophet of our time—a reputation she has long deserved.”
Giovanni Buttarelli
European Data Protection Supervisor (2014-2019)
"If a book’s importance is gauged by how effectively it describes the world we’re in, and how much potential it has to change said world, then in my view it’s easily the most important book to be published this century. I find it hard to take any young activist seriously who hasn’t at least familarised themselves with Zuboff’s central ideas. How can we live in the digital age and yet still be so innocent as to what that really means? Zuboff is concerned with the largest act of capitalist colonisation ever attempted, but the colonisation is of our minds, our behaviour, our free will, our very selves. Yet it’s not an anti-tech book. It’s anti unregulated capitalism, red in tooth and claw. It’s really this generation’s Das Kapital. Or should be. The whole argument is that there’s nothing inevitable about the ways in which the technology has been exploited. There could have been another way. There still might be."
"The most ambitious attempt yet to paint the bigger picture and to explain how the effects of digitization that we are now experiencing as individuals and citizens have come about.... A continuation of a tradition that includes Adam Smith, Max Weber, Karl Polanyi, and--dare I say it--Karl Marx.... If we fail to tame the new capitalist mutant rampaging through our societies then we will only have ourselves to blame, for we can no longer plead ignorance. A striking and illuminating book."
John Naughton
Observer
"An original an often brilliant work.... Like another recent masterwork of economic analysis, Thomas Piketty's 2013 Capital in the Twenty-First Century, the book challenges assumptions, raises uncomfortable questions about the present and future, and stakes out ground for a necessary and overdue debate."
Nicholas Carr
Los Angeles Review of Books
"Zuboff's book is a brilliant, arresting analysis of the digital economy and a plea for a social awakening about the enormity of changes that technology is imposing on political and social life."
Paul Starr
Foreign Affairs
“Zuboff’s book is the information industry’s Silent Spring.”
Chris Hoffnagle
University of California, Berkeley
"Shoshana Zuboff’s disturbing, galvanizing “The Age of Surveillance Capitalism” deserves every comparison that it’s received to Rachel Carson’s “Silent Spring”—another masterwork that laid out, with unforgettable clarity, the degradation of ordinary life held captive to profit-seeking interests. Zuboff coined the term “surveillance capitalism,” half a decade ago, to describe the “unique logic of accumulation”—recently pioneered by Google and Facebook and now practiced by every app that secretly scrapes your phone for loose data—in which 'surveillance is a foundational mechanism in the transformation of investment into profit.’"
"Groundbreaking, magisterial …. Unmissable. As we grope around in the darkness trying to grasp the contours of our digital era, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism shines a searing light on how this latest revolution is transforming our economy, politics, society--and lives."
John Thornhill
The Financial Times
"A book that no tech industry official will want the American public to read.... Insanely brilliant, deeply unsettling."
Patric McGinty
Pittsburgh Post Gazette
“It’s quite possible that the single most important book about politics, economics, culture and society in this century is Shoshana Zuboff’s The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power. She explains with far more power than anyone has done before the emergence of a whole new form of capitalism based on the expropriation of the personal data we freely give to vast corporations. It’s the Das Kapital for our times.”
Fintan O'Toole
Irish Times
“Comprehensive and impassioned…an important book.”
Bryan Appleyard
Sunday Times (London)
"A bold, important book.... Combining in-depth technical understanding and a broad, humanistic scope, Zuboff has written what may prove to be the first definitive account of the economic--and thus social and political--condition of our age."
James Bridle
Guardian
"A step-by-step account of the building of the digital iron cage,"
Alex Ross
The New Yorker
"I feel like I am a little bit safer from the predators of our time just for having it in my grasp."
Anand Giridharadas
Author of Winners Take All
An intensively researched, engagingly written chronicle of surveillance capitalism’s origins and its deleterious prospects for our society.… This is the rare book that we should trust to lead us down the long hard road of understanding.”
Jacob Silverman
New York Times Book Review
“My mind is blown on every page by the depth of Shoshana's research, the breadth of her knowledge, the rigor of her intellect, and finally by the power of her arguments. I'm not sure we can end the age of surveillance capitalism without her help, and that's why I believe this is the most important book of our time.”
Doc Searls
Author of The Intention Economy | Editor-in-Chief, Linux Journal
“In the future, if people still read books, they will view this as the classic study of how everything changed. The Age of Surveillance Capitalism is a masterpiece that stunningly reveals the essence of 21st century society, and offers a dire warning about technology gone awry that we ignore at our peril. Shoshana Zuboff has somehow escaped from the fishbowl in which we all now live, and introduced to us the concept of water. A work of penetrating intellect, this is also a deeply human book about what is becoming, as it relentlessly demonstrates, a dangerously inhuman time.”
Kevin Werbach
The Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania | Author of The Blockchain and the New Architecture of Trust
“Zuboff is a strikingly original voice, simultaneously bold and wise, eloquent and passionate, learned and accessible. Read this book to understand the inner workings of today’s digital capitalism, its threats to twenty-first century society, and the reforms we must make for a better tomorrow."
Frank Pasquale
University of Maryland Carey School of Law | Author of The Black Box Society
"A panoramic exploration of one of the most urgent issues of our times, Zuboff reinterprets contemporary capitalism through the prism of the digital revolution, producing a book of immense ambition and erudition. Zuboff is one of our most prescient and profound thinkers on the rise of the digital. In an age of inane Twitter soundbites and narcissistic Facebook posts, Zuboff’s serious scholarship is great cause for celebration”
Andrew Keen
Author of How to Fix the Future
“The defining challenge for the future of the market economy is the concentration of data, knowledge, and surveillance power. Not just our privacy but our individuality is at stake, and this very readable and thought-provoking book alerts us to these existential dangers. Highly recommended.”
Daron Acemoglu
Co-author of Why Nations Fail
“I will make a guarantee: Assuming we survive to tell the tale, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism has a high probability of joining the likes Adam Smith's The Wealth of Nations and Max Weber's Economy and Society as defining social-economics texts of modern times. It is not a 'quick read;' it is to be savored and re-read and discussed with colleagues and friends. No zippy one-liners from me, except to almost literally beg you to read/ingest this book."
Tom Peters
Co-author of In Search of Excellence
“Shoshana Zuboff has produced the most provocative compelling moral framework thus far for understanding the new realities of our digital environment and its anti-democratic threats. From now on, all serious writings on the internet and society will have to take into account The Age of Surveillance Capitalism."
Joseph Turow
Robert Lewis Shayon Chair Professor | Annenberg School, University of Pennsylvania
“Groundbreaking.… Aiming to apply Marx’s account of surplus value in a time when capital is accumulated through knowledge-based technology, she has given us an illuminating critical perspective on the regime of surveillance under which we all now live.”
John Gray
New Statesman
“An exceptional and necessary book about the information civilization we have become.”
David Patrikarakos
Literary Review
"This book’s major contribution is to give a name to what’s happening, to put it in cultural and historical perspective, and to ask us to pause long enough to think about the future and how it might be different from today.”
Frank Rose
Wall Street Journal
“Zuboff’s blow-by-blow accounts of the key players ignoring, mocking and finally riding roughshod over even governmental efforts to stop them are consistently shocking.”
Katrina Gulliver
Times Literary Supplement
Shoshana Zuboff’s The Age of Surveillance Capitalism—the most important book I have ever read on the intersection of technology, politics, and society—offers a radical reinterpretation of the changes the tech industry has wrought.”
Micah Sifry
The American Prospect
“A warning bell, sounded clearly for both the people in danger and of those with the power to do something to keep them safe…a truly sobering shock to the system, a call for ordinary people to re-assert control before it’s too late.”
The National (UAE)
“Thorough and scholarly evisceration of technology companies' data-gathering efforts.”
Washington Post
"The Age of Surveillance Capitalism is already drawing comparisons to seminal socioeconomic investigations like Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring and Karl Marx’s Das Kapital. Zuboff’s book deserves these comparisons and more: Like the former, it’s an alarming exposé about how business interests have poisoned our world, and like the latter, it provides a framework to understand and combat that poison. But The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, named for the now-popular term Zuboff herself coined five years ago, is also a masterwork of horror. It’s hard to recall a book that left me as haunted as Zuboff’s, with its descriptions of the gothic algorithmic daemons that follow us at nearly every instant of every hour of every day to suck us dry of metadata. Even those who’ve made an effort to track the technology that tracks us over the last decade or so will be chilled to their core by Zuboff, unable to look at their surroundings the same way.”
Sam Biddle
The Intercept
"The ominous relationship between modern capitalism and digital technology is put under timely scrutiny by Zuboff, whose In the Age of the Smart Machine marked her out as a chief voice concerning the information age and its impending risks.”
Irish Independent
"Zuboff powerfully argues that the digital revolution has put both our privacy and freedom in danger.… Essential reading.”
Washington Book Review
"The Age of Surveillance Capitalism is one of the most important books in recent years on the malaise afflicting the modern techno-savvy age that has brought in its wake not just the blitzkrieg of information with no measurable increase in knowledge or wisdom, but given rise to systems that aim at behavior control, threatening human nature with serious consequences."
The Hindu