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

Discussions of the term “surveillance” typically conjure thoughts of the “Panopticon,” an architectural design invented by Jeremy Bentham in the 18th century that allowed prison guards to observe and analyze prisoners without being observed themselves. How might Zuboff’s book connect to the Panopticon and its representation of the relationship between knowledge and power?

Zuboff relied on an interdisciplinary methodology in writing her book, incorporating sources from fields such as history, economics, and philosophy. Do you think using multiple subjects strengthened her argument? Or do you think analyzing surveillance capitalism would have benefited from a more specific, targeted approach?

The Age of Surveillance Capitalism is largely preoccupied with how technology influences “Western” society. What role does the West play in Zuboff’s construction of her thesis? Would the nature of her analysis of surveillance capitalism change if her book was more global than regional?

Anticolonialism scholar Edward Said often discussed the role of Otherization in imperialism, where colonizers would “Other-ize” the populations that they oppressed, projecting negative, inferior qualities onto them in order to justify their colonial violence. How does the “Other” in imperialism relate to the work of B. F. Skinner and Alex Pentland? What is the relationship between radical behaviorism’s “Other-One” and surveillance capitalism’s digital imperialism?

Throughout The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, the author inserts excerpts from W. H. Auden’s poetry. What purpose do these quotes serve, and how do they connect to Zuboff’s analysis of surveillance capitalism?

Zuboff’s primary argument in her book is that surviving surveillance capitalism necessitates popular resistance. Protest is a recurring topic in The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, with Zuboff discussing the 2011 London protests in Chapter 2 and analyzing the work of young activists, artists, and protestors in Chapter 17. Since The Age of Surveillance Capitalism was published in January 2019, the world has seen similar groundbreaking events, such as the Black Lives Matter protests in 2020 and the Hong Kong independence protests that spanned from 2019 to 2020. How do these events connect to Zuboff’s text? How do you see surveillance capitalism—and new methods of protesting—at work in these recent events?

In his The German Ideology, Vol. 1, Karl Marx describes his philosophy of historical materialism with the following: “History is nothing but the succession of the separate generations, each of which exploits the materials, the forms of capital, and the productive forces handed down to it by all preceding ones” (Marx, Karl. “The German Ideology, Vol. 1.” The Portable Karl Marx. London: Penguin Books. 1983, p. 180.). With surveillance capitalism’s means of behavioral production, how does this mutation of capitalism fit into historical materialism? Does Zuboff’s analysis of surveillance capitalism defy Marxist conceptions of history, or could “behavior” simply be this modern era’s “material”?

Several times throughout The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, Zuboff shifts from an analytical third person perspective to a more intimate first-person perspective in her narration, such as in the first few pages of Chapter 11 and the final portion of Chapter 18. What effect does this shift in voice have on these chapters, her argument, and the book overall? Why do you think Zuboff selected these specific points in The Age of Surveillance Capitalism to shift her narrative perspective?