Surveillance Capitalism, a definition;

An excerpt from the book ‘Surveillance Capitalism’ by Shoshana Zuboff

1. A new economic order that claims human experience as free raw material for hidden commercial practices of extraction, prediction and sales;
2. A parasitic economic logic in which the production of goods and services is subordinated to a new global architecture of behavioural modification;
3. A rogue mutation of capitalism marked by concentrations of wealth, knowledge and power unprecedented in human history;
4. The foundational framework of a surveillance economy;
5. As significant a threat to human nature in the twenty-first century as industrial capitalism was to the natural world in the nineteenth and twentieth;
6. The origin of a new instrumentarian power that asserts dominance over society and presents startling challenges to market democracy;
7. A movement that aims to impose a new collective order based on total certainty;
8. An expropriation of critical human rights that is best understood as a coup from above: an overthrow of the people’s sovereignty.

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Michael de Groot