Shoshana Zuboff

American academic and author of The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, the definitive critical analysis of how tech companies monetize human behavioral data.

Shoshana Zuboff is an American social psychologist and professor emerita at Harvard Business School whose landmark 2019 book The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power provided the most comprehensive and rigorous analysis yet written of the economic logic driving the major technology platforms of our era. Zuboff spent years developing the concepts in the book and the result is a work of unusual scope and ambition: part business history, part political economy, part philosophical argument about the nature of human freedom.

Zuboff argues that Google, Facebook, and similar companies have pioneered a new form of capitalism that treats human experience as raw material to be harvested, processed, and sold as “behavioral futures” — predictions about what we will do, buy, and believe. This logic, she contends, is not incidental to their business models but constitutive of them, and it creates structural incentives to expand surveillance ever deeper into human life. The book traces the historical development of this system and examines its implications for democracy, autonomy, and what it means to be human.

The Age of Surveillance Capitalism won the Goldsmith Book Prize and has been translated into numerous languages. It has influenced policy discussions in the European Union and elsewhere and given scholars, journalists, and policymakers a shared vocabulary for discussing the political economy of data. Dense and ambitious, it is one of the most important works of social analysis to have emerged from the digital age.