Book review - 'The goal is to automate us': welcome to the age of surveillance capitalism
The Age of the Smart Machine: The Future of Work and Power: Shoshana Zuboff
Reviewed by John Naughton
Reviewed by John Naughton
We’re living through the most profound
transformation in our information environment since Johannes Gutenberg’s
invention of printing in circa 1439. And the problem with living through a
revolution is that it’s impossible to take the long view of what’s happening.
Hindsight is the only exact science in this business, and in that long run
we’re all dead. Printing shaped and transformed societies over the next four
centuries, but nobody in Mainz (Gutenberg’s home town) in, say, 1495 could have
known that his technology would (among other things): fuel the Reformation
and
undermine the authority of the mighty Catholic church; enable the
rise of what we now recognise as modern science; create unheard-of professions
and industries; change the
shape of our brains; and even
recalibrate our conceptions of childhood. And yet printing did all
this and more.
Why choose 1495?
Because we’re about the same distance into our revolution, the one kicked off
by digital technology and networking. And although it’s now gradually dawning
on us that this really is a big deal and that epochal social and economic
changes are under way, we’re as clueless about where it’s heading and what’s
driving it as the citizens of Mainz were in 1495. That’s not for want of
trying, mind. Library shelves groan under the weight of books about what
digital technology is doing to us and our world. Lots of scholars are thinking,
researching and writing about this stuff. But they’re like the blind
men trying to describe the elephant in the old fable: everyone has
only a partial view, and nobody has the whole picture. So our contemporary
state of awareness is – as Manuel Castells, the great scholar of cyberspace
once put it – one of “informed bewilderment”.
Which is why the
arrival of Shoshana Zuboff’s new book is such a big event. Many years ago – in
1988, to be precise – as one of the first female professors at Harvard Business
School to hold an endowed chair she published a landmark book, The Age
of the Smart Machine: The Future of Work and Power, which changed the way
we thought about the impact of computerisation on organisations and on work. It
provided the most insightful account up to that time of how digital technology
was changing the work of both managers and workers. And then Zuboff appeared to
go quiet, though she was clearly incubating something bigger. The first hint of
what was to come was a pair of startling essays – one
in an academic journal in 2015, the other in a German newspaper in 2016. What these revealed was that she
had come up with a new lens through which to view what Google, Facebook et al
were doing – nothing less than spawning a new variant of capitalism. Those
essays promised a more comprehensive expansion of this Big Idea.
And now it has arrived
– the most ambitious attempt yet to paint the bigger picture and to explain how
the effects of digitisation that we are now experiencing as individuals and
citizens have come about... read more:
