At its worst, it could be described as apocalypse porn. “The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming” is Wallace-Wells’s book-length expansion of the piece, and it’s just as potent, if infinitely more depressing. The story rendered the abstract threat of climate change in concrete, even cinematic, terms, informing the reader without surrendering an ounce of high-level drama. You may remember David Wallace-Wells’s article “The Uninhabitable Earth,” which was published in New York magazine in 2017-a piece so widely shared and hotly debated that it required its own Wikipedia article. “ The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming,” by David Wallace-Wells
Surveillance capitalism can be curbed through sustained outrage and regulation, and it’ll have to be, or else. “These new architectures,” Zuboff writes, “feed on our fellow feeling to exploit and ultimately to suffocate the individually sensed inwardness that is the wellspring of personal autonomy and moral judgement.” But “The Age of Surveillance Capitalism” reminds us that the Internet’s central profit model isn’t inevitable, any more than it was inevitable that we allowed our country to be permanently blanketed by pesticides.
Under surveillance capitalism, we are alienated not just through the way we are forced to express our labor but through the way we are asked to express our lives. And so, as the Internet becomes essential to social and economic participation, we are forced to accept the specific, monstrous asymmetry that it allows for, in which all accessible human behavior is converted into data and harvested in a process that was designed to be invisible to us, its value accruing only among a small group of technology capitalists. We get some rewards from this process, of course, and we are constantly being reminded of them: the Internet connects us, the Internet gives us access to information, the Internet makes life convenient. Zuboff coined the term “surveillance capitalism,” half a decade ago, to describe the “unique logic of accumulation”-recently pioneered by Google and Facebook and now practiced by every app that secretly scrapes your phone for loose data-in which “surveillance is a foundational mechanism in the transformation of investment into profit.” Surveillance capitalism, Zuboff argues, has insinuated itself through colonialist logic tech companies wave flags of social improvement while plundering the land of human identity and experience to extract as much value-for themselves-as they possibly can. Shoshana Zuboff’s disturbing, galvanizing “The Age of Surveillance Capitalism” deserves every comparison that it’s received to Rachel Carson’s “ Silent Spring”-another masterwork that laid out, with unforgettable clarity, the degradation of ordinary life held captive to profit-seeking interests.
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