Shoshana Zuboff’s recent book The Age of Surveillance Capitalism reveals a world in which technology users are no longer customers but the raw material for an entirely new industrial system. Named “Notable Book of the Year” by The New York Times, Surveillance Capitalism examines the ways in which a global architecture of behaviour modification threatens human nature in the 21st century.
Zuboff will discuss insights and arguments from her book, with an introduction by Gillian Hadfield, director of the Schwartz Reisman Institute for Technology and Society.
Learn more about this event on the Rotman website. Non-U of T attendees can register via this link. The registration cost for this event is $28.99 plus HST per person, which includes the link to the livestream and 1 unsigned paperback copy of The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, or $49.50 plus HST per person, which includes the link to the livestream and 1 unsigned hardcover copy of The Age of Surveillance Capitalism.
Registration is free for U of T staff, faculty, and students, but does not include a copy of the book. U of T members can register via this link.
About Shoshana Zuboff
Shoshana Zuboff is the author of three books, each of which signaled the start of a new epoch in technological society. In the late 1980s her decade-in-the-making In the Age of the Smart Machine: The Future of Work and Power became an instant classic that foresaw how computers would revolutionize the modern workplace. At the dawn of the twenty-first century her influential The Support Economy: Why Corporations Are Failing Individuals and the Next Episode of Capitalism (with James Maxmin), written before the invention of the iPod or Uber, predicted the rise of digitally-mediated products and services tailored to the individual. It warned of the individual and societal risks if companies failed to alter their approach to capitalism. Now her masterwork, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power, synthesizes years of research and thinking in order to reveal a world in which technology users are neither customers, employees, nor products. Instead they are the raw material for new procedures of manufacturing and sales that define an entirely new economic order: a surveillance economy. She is the Charles Edward Wilson Professor Emerita at Harvard Business School and a former Faculty Associate at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society at Harvard Law School.
Shoshana Zuboff