Surveillance Capitalism

Abstract

Surveillance capitalism is a term used and popularized by academic Shoshana Zuboff that denotes a new genus of capitalism that monetizes data acquired through surveillance.[1][2][3] According to her it emerged due to the "coupling of the vast powers of the digital with the radical indifference and intrinsic narcissism of the financial capitalism and its neoliberal vision that have dominated commerce for at least three decades, especially in the Anglo economies"[2] and depends on the global architecture of computer mediation which produces a distributed and largely uncontested new expression of power she calls 'Big Other'.[4] She states it was first discovered and consolidated at Google, being to surveillance capitalism what Ford and General Motors were to mass-production and managerial capitalism a century ago, and later adopted by Facebook and others[2] and that it uses illegible mechanisms of extraction, commodification, and control of behavior to produce new markets of behavioral prediction and modification.[4] Zuboff states that "the online world, which used to be kind of our world, is now where capitalism is developing in new ways"[5] by data extraction rather than the production of new goods, thus generating intense concentrations of power over extraction and threatening core values such as freedom[6] and privacy.[2] Contents 1 Background 2 Key features 3 Countermeasures and solutions 4 See also 5 References 6 Further reading 7 External links Background Economic pressures of capitalism are driving the intensification of connection and monitoring online with spaces of social life becoming open to saturation by corporate actors, directed at the making of profit and/or the regulation of action.[6] Relevantly[6] Turow writes that "centrality of corporate power is a direct reality at the very heart of the digital age".[7] Capitalism has become focused on expanding the proportion of social life that is open to data collection and data processing.[6] This may come with significant implications for vulnerability and control of society as well as for privacy. However, increased data collection may also have various