Untitled Shoshana Zuboff

Surveillance capitalism is what happened when American democracy gifted the new digital terrain of the internet to private companies, enabling them to own and operate the information and communication spaces of global society. It produced mythic wealth and became the dominant economic paradigm in only two decades based on an extraordinary, brazen, audacious, and deeply antidemocratic idea: that predictions of human behaviour can be sold in bulk like tons of wheat or barrels of oil. The consequences have threatened the democratic order from above and below, weakening essential democratic institutions, displacing authentic social solidarity, and undermining individual capabilities associated with autonomy, common sense, and self-determination without which the democratic project is unimaginable. Just a few years since the publication of Zuboff's groundbreaking The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, the need for unflinching solutions has never been greater. Our democracies are under the kind of siege that can only be cured with new institutions, rights, and laws. This is an urgent call to action from one of the greatest thinkers of our time.