Surveillance Capitalism, a definition;

An excerpt from the book ‘Surveillance Capitalism’ by Shoshana Zuboff

  1. A new economic order that claims human experience as free raw material for hidden commercial practices of extraction, prediction and sales;
  2. A parasitic economic logic in which the production of goods and services is subordinated to a new global architecture of behavioural modification;
  3. A rogue mutation of capitalism marked by concentrations of wealth, knowledge and power unprecedented in human history;
  4. The foundational framework of a surveillance economy;
  5. As significant a threat to human nature in the twenty-first century as industrial capitalism was to the natural world in the nineteenth and twentieth;
  6. The origin of a new instrumentarian power that asserts dominance over society and presents startling challenges to market democracy;
  7. A movement that aims to impose a new collective order based on total certainty;
  8. An expropriation of critical human rights that is best understood as a coup from above: an overthrow of the people’s sovereignty.

Michael de Groot