Shoshana Zuboff, a professor at Harvard Business School, first came to my attention from an aside remark by a different writer who borrowed Zuboff’s term “surveillance capitalism” in a boarder discussion about social media and the firms behind it. The terms accuracy and pithiness struck me immediately, and I made a note to chase down more of Zuboff’s work. Not long after, reviews of her book The Age of Surveillance Capitalism started to pur in, affirming that this was likely to be the magisterial account we have been waiting for around the history and implications of the companies behind this new paradigm. I have been slow to actually pick up a copy of the book in my stubborness not to depart from my pre-existing stack of books to read, so I was delighted to find an avenue to cheat in the form of an episode of the podcast Hidden Forces.
I came across the podcast when I was tracking down their interview with Hong Kong investor David Webb, but saw that Zuboff had been interviewed around the same time. I listened with great apprehension and was richly reward for my time – Zuboff is wonderfully articulate, makes things as simple as possible without simplifying, and the depth and breadth of her work makes her deeply compelling. The host of the podcast isn’t particularly useful, but has the good sense to mostly stay quiet and listen. A highly recommended listen, and on the basis of this alone I can declare Zuboff is truly one of the triumvirate, along with Lanier and Morozov, who cut through the noise on the reality of the internet, big data, privacy, capitalism, and how they all relate to today’s human experience.
https://www.hiddenforces.io/podcast/shoshana-zuboff-surveillance-capitalism
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