Book Review

摘要

Zuboff, Shoshana (2019) The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power, New York: Public Affairs. Shoshana Zuboff has written a mind-blowing, thought-provoking, and in depth researched great narrative about how Google, Facebook and other tech-giants deliberately exploit our personal experiences, and turn them into money, power and knowledge. This new technocratic empire uses artificial intelligence to rub us of our innermost private thoughts and feelings, converting them into predictions about our future behaviour. These are then employed to monitor and nudge us to 'voluntarily' contribute to our continuing exploitation, thus undermining our own individual rights and practices of freedom. The techgiants generate an image of us as free to express ourselves while in reality enslaving us as a means to fulfil their own aims. As Zuboff defines it on the opening page before she begins to unfold her complex story, "Sur-veil-lance cap-i-tal-ism, n" [is].