Zuboff’s 1988 In the Age of the Smart Machine is still considered one of the most important assessments of the impact of computers on society. Her new book updates the picture with a comprehensive analysis of the social, political, business, and technological meaning of recent advances in digital technology. The recent Cambridge Analytica scandal and the continuing Facebook headlines are just glimpses of the ways big tech companies exploit personal data without our knowledge, and how those data are used to shape our behavior. And yet the crisis we face today is neither digital technology nor the practices of Facebook and Google. A board member of the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC) and Charles Edward Wilson Professor emerita at Harvard Business School, Zuboff exposes the real menace: the unprecedented economic logic she calls “surveillance capitalism” invented at Google, duplicated at Facebook, rampant in Silicon Valley, and now infecting every industry. Its tools of behavior modification and social engineering, threatens basic freedoms, challenges individual autonomy, and increases social inequality, and our challenge now is to move past the shock and revulsion to ask the most important question of our time: Will we be the masters of the information age or will it master us?
