LONG REVIEW

摘要

It took me almost a month to figure out my opinion about Shoshana Zuboff's The Age of Surveillance Capitalism. Being familiar with her well-cited 2015 article on the same topic (Zuboff 2015) and having recently seen her deliver an impressive keynote at the September 2018 Decode Symposium in Barcelona, I purchased it days after its English version went on sale in early January 2019. What I anticipated was a significant contribution to our understanding of the troubling datafied moment in which we find ourselves. What I received was ... not that. While I am predisposed to agree with Shoshana Zuboffs worries about an ... apocalyptic isn't too strong a word ... surveillance capitalist dystopia, I found much of the book problematic, almost on a molecular level. The way that Zuboff presented her argument, particularly her seeming neglect of whole swaths of relevant literature, all spoke of a book that was much more flawed than what was suggested by the initial January 2019 popular-press rave reviews (Carr 2019; Szalal 2019), which included a favourable comparison to Thomas Piketty's seismic Capital in the Twenty-First Century (Naughton 2019). Since then, the first academic reviews that have come in, while offering limited critiques, have described it as 'both a descriptive tour de force and a theoretical triumph' (Cohen 2019) and 'a priceless work' (Evangelista 2019).1 It felt like I had read a completely different book from everyone else.