The Age of Surveillance Capitalism
The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power

Quotes

An International Bestseller
 
A New York Times Notable Book of the Year
 
A Financial Times Best Book of the Year
 
A Sunday Times (UK) Best Business Book of the Year
 
Selected by Barack Obama, Zadie Smith (in the Wall Street Journal), Jia Tolentino (in the
New Yorker), Elif Shafak (in the Guardian), and Ana Botin (in Bloomberg) as one of the
best books of 2019
 
Finalist for the Financial Times/McKinsey Best Book of the Year Award

“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... 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.”—Zadie Smith

“Extraordinarily intelligent... Absorbing Zuboff’s methodical determination, the way she pieces together sundry examples into this comprehensive work of scholarship and synthesis, requires patience, but the rewards are considerable ‑ a heightened sense of awareness, and a deeper appreciation of what’s at stake. A business model that seeks growth by cataloging our ‘every move, emotion, utterance and desire’ is too radical to be taken for granted. As Zuboff repeatedly says near the end of the book, ‘It is not O.K.’”—Jennifer Szalai, New York Times

“The rare volume that puts a name on a problem just as it becomes critical... 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

“Many adjectives could be used to describe Shoshana Zuboff’s latest book: groundbreaking, magisterial, alarming, alarmist, preposterous. One will do: 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, Financial Times

“One of the most important criticisms of the power of Big Tech.”—Rana Foroohar, Financial Times

“The most ambitious attempt yet to paint the bigger picture and to explain how the effects of digitisation 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... A striking and illuminating book.”—The Observer

“Shoshana Zuboff’s The Age of Surveillance Capitalism is already drawing comparisons to seminal socioeconomic investigations like Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring and Karl Marx’s Capital. 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

“A definitive, stunning analysis of how digital giants like Google, Facebook, etc. have single‑mindedly pursued data on human behavior as fodder for generating predictions and shaping outcomes salable to advertisers and others...The scope of her analysis is extraordinary; in addition to covering philosophical, social, and political implications she discusses needed privacy regulation...This book is pathbreaking, illuminating, and unnerving.”—Choice

“Chilling and essential.”—Globe And Mail