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

"She’d probably describe herself in part as an activist now. The book has made a big splash in the area of criticism of the digital economy. Lots of books have come out this year on this topic, looking at the way in which particularly the biggest US technology companies—Google, Facebook and others—have accumulated our private data. Zuboff calls this surveillance capitalism. She’s really criticizing this land grab for data. Google is the central company that she attacks, but she also takes it to Facebook and Microsoft. She makes the case that even if the companies themselves aren’t evil (and she doesn’t necessarily agree that they aren’t), they are accumulating a large amount of unaccountable power through the data that they gather. It’s not only about the raw data, but also about the way in which they can take various types of data and marry them together. We have smart devices—not just our smart phones, but also the digital devices in our homes, self-driving cars, healthcare tools. Together these provide a way for companies to find out what we’re doing and, this is even more sinister, they can actually manipulate how we behave. The publishing industry has a long lead time and you could think of books as a lagging indicator of what’s happening in the world. A couple of years ago, there were a number of books that looked at the technology revolution. At that point, we were able to make the assumption that there would be problems ahead, but it was largely about the threat of automation in the workplace and indeed in 2016 we gave the prize to a book called The Rise of the Robots: Technology and the Threat of Mass Unemployment . Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . Those issues are still a theme that books pick up, but I noticed a year or so later that there was a wave of books that included the word ‘human’ in the title. They were humanizing the problem of automation and reiterating what the human beings could bring to this. Now we’ve had books that are really attacking the privacy question. They’re starting to say that Facebook, Amazon and Google are not just these great innovative companies, they’re actually a sinister force. This was triggered by things like the manipulation of elections and the Cambridge Analytica scandal at Facebook. These have prompted an upsurge in calls for greater regulation, particularly of the Silicon Valley, US tech giants. It’s unmissable in both senses, it’s unmissable in that it’s got some very important messages, and it’s also unmissably large. If it’s on your bookshelf, nobody is going to miss that you’ve got it. It’s a heavy book in every respect, but that doesn’t mute the force of the message. Kochland is a very big book as well. It’s not necessarily a disadvantage. We’ve had big books and slimmer books win in the past."