The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power by Shoshana Zuboff

INTRODUCTION

CHAPTER ONE
HOME OR EXILE IN THE DIGITAL
FUTURE
I saw him crying, shedding floods of tears upon
Calypso’s island, in her chambers.
She traps him there; he cannot go back home.
—HOMER, THE ODYSSEY

I. The Oldest Questions
“Are we all going to be working for a smart machine, or will we have
smart people around the machine?” The question was posed to me in 1981
by a young paper mill manager sometime between the fried catfish and the
pecan pie on my first night in the small southern town that was home to his
mammoth plant and would become my home periodically for the next six
years. On that rainy night his words flooded my brain, drowning out the
quickening tap tap tap of raindrops on the awning above our table. I
recognized the oldest political questions: Home or exile? Lord or subject?
Master or slave? These are eternal themes of knowledge, authority, and
power that can never be settled for all time. There is no end of history; each
generation must assert its will and imagination as new threats require us to
retry the case in every age.
Perhaps because there was no one else to ask, the plant manager’s voice
was weighted with urgency and frustration: “What’s it gonna be? Which
way are we supposed to go? I must know now. There is no time to spare.” I
wanted the answers, too, and so I began the project that thirty years ago
became my first book, In the Age of the Smart Machine: The Future of
Work and Power. That work turned out to be the opening chapter in what
became a lifelong quest to answer the question “Can the digital future be
our home?”
It has been many years since that warm southern evening, but the oldest
questions have come roaring back with a vengeance. The digital realm is
overtaking and redefining everything familiar even before we have had a
chance to ponder and decide. We celebrate the networked world for the
many ways in which it enriches our capabilities and prospects, but it has
birthed whole new territories of anxiety, danger, and violence as the sense
of a predictable future slips away.
When we ask the oldest questions now, billions of people from every
social strata, generation, and society must answer. Information and
communications technologies are more widespread than electricity,

The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power by Shoshana Zuboff