Big other: Surveillance Capitalism and the Prospects of an Information Civilization

2015/03/01 by Shoshana Zuboff · 1 voice · 16 citations
Social Sciences · #Privacy, Security, and Data Protection #Ethics and Social Impacts of AI #Cybersecurity and Cyber Warfare Studies

paper · doi:10.1057/jit.2015.5

openalex publication_date 2015/03/01 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/08/04

Abstract

This article describes an emergent logic of accumulation in the networked sphere, ‘surveillance capitalism,’ and considers its implications for ‘information civilization.’ The institutionalizing practices and operational assumptions of Google Inc. are the primary lens for this analysis as they are rendered in two recent articles authored by Google Chief Economist Hal Varian. Varian asserts four uses that follow from computer-mediated transactions: data extraction and analysis,’ ‘new contractual forms due to better monitoring,’ ‘personalization and customization, ’ and continuous experiments. ’ An examination of the nature and consequences of these uses sheds light on the implicit logic of surveillance capitalism and the global architecture of computer mediation upon which it depends. This architecture produces a distributed and largely uncontested new expression of power that I christen: Big Other. ’ It is constituted by unexpected and often illegible mechanisms of extraction, commodification, and control that effectively exile persons from their own behavior while producing new markets of behavioral prediction and modification. Surveillance capitalism challenges democratic norms and departs in key ways from the centuries-long evolution of market capitalism.

Citations

• Experimental evidence of massive-scale emotional contagion through social networks
• MapReduce

Cited by

• “My phone must be listening!”: Peoples’ surveillance beliefs around devices “listening” to offline conversations in the US, the Netherlands, and Poland
• Designing Counter-Choreographies: Embodied Choreographic Approaches for Critical Examination of Online Tracking
• Linking Human And Machine Behavior: A New Approach to Evaluate Training Data Quality for Beneficial Machine Learning
• My Data, My Choice? Privacy, Commodity Activism, and Big Tech’s Corporatization of Care in the Post-Roe Era
• The corporate cultivation of digital resignation
• A Maussian bargain: Accumulation by gift in the digital economy
• Who is afraid of dataveillance? Attitudes toward online surveillance in a cross-cultural and generational perspective
• At the crossroads of logics: Automating newswork with artificial intelligence—(Re)defining journalistic logics from the perspective of technologists
• Thinking Outside the Black-Box: The Case for “Algorithmic Sovereignty” in Social Media
• From People to Objects: The digital transformation of fields
• The limits of transparency: Data brokers and commodification
• The political rationalities of indebtedness: Control, discipline, sovereignty
• Work by app: algorithmic management and working conditions of Uber drivers in Brazil
• Beyond surveillance capitalism: Privacy, regulation and big data in Europe and China
• Tourists’ Health Risk Threats Amid COVID-19 Era: Role of Technology Innovation, Transformation, and Recovery Implications for Sustainable Tourism
• Criticism of capitalism [wikipedia]

Discussions

• There is no other piece that makes me want to chuck my phone out the window quite like this one does every time I return to it. doi.org/10.1057/jit.... [bsky, 0 points, 0 comments]