How Big Tech Built the Iron Cage

Shoshana Zuboff, a professor emerita at Harvard Business School, mentions the citizens of Broughton more than once in her book “The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power”—a reckoning with the stranglehold that Google, Facebook, Amazon, and other Big Tech companies exert over our lives and minds. Zuboff’s work is likely to have a longer life than most, not only because she deploys an indispensable term—surveillance capitalism is defined as “a new economic order that claims human experience as free raw material for hidden commercial practices of extraction, prediction, and sales”—but because her arguments are backed by staggeringly thorough documentation. Close scrutiny of a patent that Google filed at the end of 2003—“Generating User Information for Use in Targeted Advertising”—allows Zuboff to establish that user profiles were “deduced” or “extracted” from personal data that users may have wished to keep hidden.

Source: www.newyorker.com