Shoshana Zuboff Named the Age We Live In. Are We Listening?

Every few decades, someone gives a name to something we had all been feeling but could not quite describe. Shoshana Zuboff did that for the internet age. She looked at the free apps, the personalised feeds, the eerily well-timed ads, and the quiet ambient tracking that follows us across screens, and she called it what it is: a new economic order that turns human experience into raw material. She named it surveillance capitalism, and once you have the name, you cannot stop seeing the thing.

I keep coming back to her work because it maps so cleanly onto a pattern I have chased across other technologies — the way a tool that promises to serve us gets quietly turned to serve someone else’s balance sheet. Zuboff gave that pattern its sharpest modern statement. So who is she, what exactly did she argue, and why does her warning matter more now, not less?

Who Shoshana Zuboff actually is

Zuboff is not a tech journalist or a Silicon Valley insider turned critic. She is a scholar of the digital economy who spent decades inside one of the institutions that helped build modern management thinking. A former professor at Harvard Business School, she was one of the first tenured women there, and her career has been unusually consistent: for more than forty years she has asked the same underlying question, which is what happens to human beings when information technology reorganises the world of work and, later, the whole texture of daily life.

Her first major book, back in the late 1980s, examined what computers were doing to the workplace — how they could either be used to inform and empower workers or to automate and control them. That early fork in the road matters, because it shows she was never a technophobe. Her concern has always been about power: who gets to decide how a technology is used, who benefits, and who is acted upon. By the time she published The Age of Surveillance Capitalism in 2019, that lifelong question had found its defining subject.

What she did: naming a hidden economic logic

Zuboff’s central move was to insist that the dominant tech companies are not really in the business of connecting us or organising the world’s information, whatever their mission statements say. They are in the business of prediction. And prediction needs fuel.

That fuel is what she calls behavioural surplus. When you use a search engine or a social platform, some of the data you generate is used to improve the service — to give you better results, a smoother feed. But there is a surplus: far more behavioural data than the service itself requires. Every scroll, pause, hesitation, click, location ping, and typo becomes a signal. Zuboff’s argument is that surveillance capitalism was born when a handful of companies realised this leftover exhaust was not waste at all. It was the most valuable thing they had.

Here is the chain as she describes it, and it is worth spelling out plainly because it is the whole engine. Human experience is claimed as free raw material. That material is fed into machine intelligence to produce predictions about what people will do — now, soon, and later. Those predictions are assembled into products. And those prediction products are sold in a new kind of marketplace to businesses that want to know, and increasingly to shape, what we will do next. We are not the customers in this arrangement. We are not even really the product. We are the free source of the raw material from which the actual products are made.

We are not the customers. We are the free source of the raw material from which the real products — predictions about our behaviour — are made and sold.

If you want the mechanics of that engine in more depth, I have written a separate plain-English guide to surveillance capitalism as a concept. What I want to sit with here is Zuboff herself — the thinker, the argument, and the fight over whether she got it right.

From predicting behaviour to steering it

The part of her work that unsettles people most is where the story goes next. Predicting behaviour, she argues, is only the beginning. The surest way to know what someone will do is to nudge them toward doing it. So the logic pushes from forecasting into intervention — tuning, herding, and conditioning us at scale, often below the threshold of awareness, to make our behaviour more predictable and therefore more profitable.

To describe the kind of power this represents, Zuboff coined another term: instrumentarian power. She is careful to distinguish it from the totalitarianism of the twentieth century. Totalitarian power wanted your soul; it worked through terror and demanded belief. Instrumentarian power does not care what you believe. It does not need your loyalty or your fear. It simply wants to observe your behaviour and modify it — to treat you as an instrument, a source of signals to be measured and tuned. It is indifferent, not cruel, and that indifference is exactly what makes it hard to see and hard to resist.

This connects to something I think about constantly: the way an attention economy and a prediction economy reinforce each other. Capturing your attention produces the behavioural data; the data produces better predictions; better predictions capture more attention. Zuboff’s contribution is to show that the goal was never really the attention for its own sake. Attention was the means. Behaviour was always the prize.

Why it mattered: a vocabulary and a warning

The reason Zuboff’s book landed the way it did is that it arrived just as a diffuse public unease was looking for words. People sensed they were being watched and manipulated online, but the conversation was stuck on privacy — on the idea that we had each individually failed to read the terms and conditions. Zuboff reframed the whole thing. This was not a story about careless individuals. It was a story about an economic system with its own logic, its own incentives, and its own tendency toward concentration.

That reframing gave the era a vocabulary. Terms like behavioural surplus and instrumentarian power gave critics, regulators, and ordinary readers a way to talk about the machinery rather than just the symptoms. And it gave us a warning: that this power is accumulating in very few hands, that it is largely unaccountable, and that it operates by design in the dark, because it depends on our not fully understanding what is being taken from us.

That warning is really an argument about consent and asymmetry. Surveillance capitalists know almost everything about us; we know almost nothing about them. They declare our experience free for the taking, and the taking happens whether we agree or not, because opting out increasingly means opting out of modern life. Zuboff calls this a coup from above — not a seizure of the state, but a quiet redistribution of knowledge and the power that flows from it, away from individuals and toward a handful of firms.

The fair critiques

Because her argument is so sweeping, it has drawn serious pushback, and an honest account has to include it. I find the critiques clarifying rather than damning, but they are worth taking on their own terms.

The first is about novelty. Zuboff presents surveillance capitalism as a genuine rupture, a new mutation of capitalism. Critics — many of them on the left — argue she overstates how new it is. Capitalism has always found fresh domains to enclose and commodify; extracting value from workers and consumers, dispossessing people of things they did not know were up for grabs, is the oldest move there is. From this view, what she describes is capitalism doing what it has always done, now with faster computers.

The second, related critique is that she underplays labour and class. By centring the extraction of data from users, some argue, she skips past the workers — the content moderators, the warehouse staff, the gig drivers, the underpaid data labellers — whose conditions are shaped by these same companies. If the problem is framed mainly as data taken from all of us equally, it can obscure the very unequal ways this economy lands on different people. Who pays is not evenly distributed, and a class lens brings that into focus.

The third is the charge of technological determinism. At times Zuboff writes as though the technology, or the market logic, unfolds with an almost unstoppable momentum. Critics counter that these were choices — business models, financial pressures, regulatory failures — made by identifiable people who could have chosen otherwise, and could still. If it all feels inevitable, we are less likely to organise against it.

The strongest critique is also the most hopeful: none of this was inevitable. It was chosen — which means it can be chosen differently.

I take these seriously, and I think they sharpen her work rather than sink it. The pattern of enclosure genuinely is old; naming its newest form does not require pretending history began in 2007. And the question of who bears the cost — the labour question — is exactly the kind of thing that keeps a critique honest. This is the same terrain I keep returning to when I write about how technology gets captured: the interesting fights are always over who takes, who pays, and who is in a position to fight back.

Why she matters more in the age of AI

Here is why I think Zuboff’s work has aged into something more urgent than when it was published. The current wave of artificial intelligence runs on precisely the resource she warned about. Large-scale AI systems are hungry for behavioural data — the vast records of human writing, clicking, searching, watching, and interacting that surveillance capitalism spent two decades accumulating. The same firms that pioneered behavioural surplus extraction are, not coincidentally, among those best positioned to dominate AI, because they already own the data and the infrastructure.

So the prediction engine she described has not been dismantled. It has been supercharged. AI makes the predictions sharper, the personalisation tighter, and the capacity to steer behaviour more powerful and more automated. If instrumentarian power was concerning when it depended on relatively crude models, it is more concerning when the models can generate persuasive text, images, and voices tailored to each of us in real time.

And yet the limits Zuboff called for have largely not arrived. She argued that surveillance capitalism was not inevitable — that it grew in a vacuum of law, and that democratic societies could choose to make some of its practices simply illegal, the way we once outlawed child labour or unsafe food. There has been movement: privacy regulation in various places, antitrust cases, a louder public conversation. But nothing yet that fundamentally interrupts the core mechanism of claiming human experience as free raw material. The engine still runs on the same fuel.

That gap — between the scale of the diagnosis and the modesty of the response — is where her work still bites. It also rhymes with newer arguments that the biggest platforms have become less like markets and more like private territories we are forced to live inside, a shift some describe as technofeudalism. Whether you call the destination surveillance capitalism or something else, Zuboff was among the first to draw the map.

Are we listening?

Zuboff named the age we live in. She gave us behavioural surplus, instrumentarian power, and a way of seeing the quiet extraction happening behind every friendly interface. Her critics are right that the pattern is older than she sometimes lets on and that the costs fall unevenly. But the core of what she saw — that human experience has been declared free for the taking, that prediction and behavioural steering are the real business, and that the resulting power is concentrated and unaccountable — has only become more true as AI absorbs the very data she warned us about.

The uncomfortable part is that naming a thing is not the same as stopping it. She handed us the vocabulary and the warning years ago. The question she leaves us with is not whether she was right. It is whether we intend to do anything about it while the choice is still ours to make.