121. Shoshana Zuboff: The Age of Surveillance Capitalism
Shoshana Zuboff
January 31, 2019
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Today we’re speaking to Shoshana Zuboff, professor emerita at Harvard Business School. She has just released THE AGE OF SURVEILLANCE CAPITALISM: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power, a book sure to become an authoritative voice on the emerging economic logic that is shaping more than just our buying behaviors.
Today she explains what surveillance capitalism is, what it means and why the Facebook / Cambridge Analytica scandal was just the tip of the iceberg.
We also talk about the moral relativism of Google’s “Do No Evil” (updated recently to “Do the Right Thing.”).
Topics include:
How technology companies manipulate our personal data
How the dot com bust helped to fundamentally change the nature of capitalism
What ‘behavioral futures’ are and why they’re so valuable
Why the design of smart homes has changed
The relationship between predicting future behavior and influencing it
How regulation can help mitigate the power and influence of large technology companies on our government
Shoshana Zuboff is an author and scholar whose new work, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power, integrates her lifelong themes: the digital revolution, the evolution of capitalism, the historical emergence of psychological individuality, and the conditions for human development. Zuboff is also the author of the seminal In the Age of Smart Machine: The Future of Work and Power and the influential The Support Economy: Why Corporations Are Failing Individuals and the Next Episode of Capitalism (with James Maxmin), along with many scholarly and popular articles. Her 2015 scholarly paper, “Big Other: Surveillance Capitalism and the Prospects of an Information Civilization” was the recipient of the Best Paper Award from the International Conference of Information Systems Senior Scholars in 2016.
Zuboff received her Ph.D. in social psychology from Harvard University and her BA in philosophy from the University of Chicago. She joined the Harvard Business School in 1981 where she became the Charles Edward Wilson Professor of Business Administration and one of the first tenured women on the HBS faculty. In 2014 and 2015 she was a Faculty Associate at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at the Harvard Law School. Zuboff has been a frequent contributor to the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung writing at the intersection of capitalism and the digital, as well as a featured columnist for both Fast Company and BusinessWeek Online.