Shoshana Zuboff

 ( 1951 Births ) 

Zuboff was married to businessman and academic James Maxmin until his death in 2016. They co-wrote two books together, and lived in Nobleboro, Maine. They had a son, Jake, and a daughter, Chloe Maxmin, who is a former state legislator in Maine.

Major concepts introduced in this book relate to knowledge, authority, and power in the information workplace. These include the duality of information technology as an informating and an automating technology; the abstraction of work associated with information technology and its related intellectual skill demands; computer-mediated work; the "information panopticon"; information technology as a challenge to managerial authority and command/control; the social construction of technology; the shift from a division of labor to a division of learning; and the inherently collaborative patterns of information work, among others.

Writing before the advent of smartphones and widespread Internet access, Zuboff and Maxmin argue that wealth creation in an individualized society would require leveraging new digital capabilities to enable a "distributed capitalism". This would entail a shift away from a primary focus on economies of scale, asset intensification, concentration, central control, and anonymous transactions in "organization-space" towards support-oriented relationships in "individual-space" with products and services configured and distributed to meet individualized wants and needs.

Surveillance capitalism and its consequences for twenty-first century society are most fully theorized in her book The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power. She summarizes it thus: "Surveillance capitalism is best described as a coup from above, not an overthrow of the state but rather an overthrow of the people's sovereignty and a prominent force in the perilous drift towards democratic de-consolidation that now threatens Western liberal democracies."

The "epistemic coup" (i.e. the coup enacted by tech corporations to claim ownership of knowledge in society) is summarized as follows: "In an information civilization, societies are defined by questions of knowledge—how it is distributed, the authority that governs its distribution and the power that protects that authority. Who knows? Who decides who knows? Who decides who decides who knows? Surveillance capitalists now hold the answers to each question, though we never elected them to govern. This is the essence of the epistemic coup. They claim the authority to decide who knows by asserting ownership rights over our personal information and defend that authority with the power to control critical information systems and infrastructures."

Zuboff's scholarship on surveillance capitalism as a "rogue mutation of capitalism" has become a primary framework for understanding big data and the larger field of commercial surveillance that she describes as a "surveillance-based economic order". She argues that neither Privacy law nor Competition law laws provide adequate protection from the unprecedented practices of surveillance capitalism. Zuboff describes surveillance capitalism as an economic and social logic. Her book originated the concept of "instrumentarian power", in comparison to traditional Totalitarianism. Instrumentarian power is a consequence of surveillance capitalist operations which threaten individual autonomy and democracy. As the driving force behind it, she identifies capital accumulation, without being confined to market capitalism.

Many issues that plague contemporary society including the assault on privacy and the so-called "privacy paradox", behavioral targeting, fake news, ubiquitous tracking, legislative and regulatory failure, algorithmic governance, social media addiction, abrogation of human rights, democratic destabilization, and more are reinterpreted and explained through the lens of surveillance capitalism's economic and social imperatives. Her work is an influential source for the Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence community.

Zuboff also became a business columnist, developing and disseminating new concepts from The Support Economy. From 2003 to 2005, Zuboff published her ideas in her monthly column "Evolving", published in the magazine Fast Company. From 2007 through 2009, she was a featured columnist for Business Week.

From 2013 to 2016, Zuboff was a frequent contributor to the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung ( FAZ), where essays drawn from her emerging work on surveillance capitalism were published in German and English. In 2019, Zuboff further developed her critique of the social, political and economic impacts of digital technologies in The Age of Surveillance Capitalism.