Abstract
Surveillance capitalism emerged in the early 2000s as tech giants turned personal data into a commodity for profit. Drawing on Foucault, Marx, and Heidegger, Zuboff argues that this model reduces human experience to raw material for market extraction. Zuboff calls for collective resistance and robust regulation to restore informational self‑determination and protect democratic governance.
Contexts
Historical
The origins of surveillance capitalism can be traced back to the early 2000s when technology giants like Google and Facebook began to exploit the potential of personal data for commercial purposes. The widespread adoption of digital technologies and the proliferation of online services created an unprecedented opportunity for companies to collect, analyse, and monetise vast amounts of user data.
Zuboff traces the historical origins of surveillance capitalism to experiments in targeted advertising and early data-science projects, showing how corporate incentives and technology (ubiquitous sensors, algorithms, and scalable computing) created an infrastructure for mass behavioural modification.
She emphasises that surveillance capitalism is not simply surveillance for security or governance but a commercial imperative: firms seek "prediction products" that forecast and influence future behaviour. These commercial practices are linked to political and social consequences, arguing that the commodification of behaviour corrodes individual autonomy and democratic processes.
Philosophical
Shoshana Zuboff draws on themes from Foucault’s work on disciplinary power and governmentality and describes how digital firms exercise a pervasive, decentralised influence by shaping environments and incentives so that people’s behaviour is predictably orientated toward commercial ends.
Shoshana Zuboff describes surveillance capitalism as a new economic logic that
“claims human experience as free raw material for translation into behavioural data”.
This is a process driven by corporations that extract, predict, and shape human behaviour for profit.
This conception echoes Foucault’s analysis of power as productive rather than merely repressive: surveillance capitalism does not only observe subjects but transforms them into predictable data‑points and futures to be engineered. Where Foucault’s panopticon illustrated how visibility disciplines bodies and habits, Zuboff maps a global, digitally networked panopticon that externalises private experience into commodified streams, so power now operates through data infrastructures that both know and nudge populations.
Foucault’s work, especially in Discipline and Punish, shows how modern power works through surveillance, normalisation, and the production of knowledge: “Visibility is a trap,” he wrote, capturing how observation produces compliant subjects. Zuboff extends this by showing that visibility under surveillance capitalism is monetised: data‑driven prediction markets convert intimate behaviours into forecasts and interventions, turning Foucault’s disciplinary mechanisms into algorithms. The result is a hybrid form of power where corporate actors, using techniques Foucault described for institutions, create new modalities of control that are diffuse, automated, and orientated toward shaping future conduct rather than merely enforcing present norms.
Surveillance capitalism’s extraction of behavioural surplus and its conversion into predictive products extends Marx’s concept of capital accumulation: data is a new commodity produced from users’ behaviour and reinvested to generate more profit and control:
Marx: “Capital is dead labour that, vampire-like, only lives by sucking living labour.”
Digital users freely provide behavioural data that surveillance firms monetise, mirroring Marx’s unpaid extraction of surplus value from workers. The platform-user relation transforms everyday activities into labour without recognition or compensation, deepening exploitation beyond the factory:
Zuboff: “Users are not customers so much as sources of free behavioural data.”
Marx: “The surplus-value produced by labour belongs to capital.”
Surveillance systems alienate individuals from their actions and choices by translating private behaviour into proprietary data streams controlled by firms, separating people from the meaningful use of their own information. This reflects Marx’s notion that workers become estranged from the product and process of labour.
Surveillance capitalism creates a new class divide between data extractors (platform owners, tech capital) and data producers (users), producing antagonisms analogous to proletariat vs. bourgeoisie but structured around information and prediction rather than solely wage labour.
Marx & Engels: “The modern bourgeoisie… has created new industries, new methods of production, and… new class antagonisms.”
Platforms manufacture consent by shaping choices and norms through targeted prediction and nudging, aligning with Marx’s idea of ideology and false consciousness that masks exploitative relations and reproduces capitalist social relations.
Zuboff: “Instrumentarian power aims at the modification of behavior without the consent of the will.”
Marx: “The ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas.”
This transformation poses a problem for informed consent extracted through dense terms of service and default settings. These are functionally hollow when the technologies and inferences involved are hidden from users. The ethical stakes therefore include violations of dignity and fairness, not only privacy in the narrow sense but also the exploitation of attention and affect for profit.
From an epistemological standpoint, Zuboff underlines the asymmetry of knowledge: firms accumulate vast, predictive knowledge about individuals while subjects remain ignorant of what is known or how it is used. This epistemic imbalance generates forms of injustice (people cannot contest or understand the algorithmic inferences that influence them) and it reframes questions of responsibility and agency. If behaviour is steered by predictive systems, traditional accounts of individual responsibility and moral praise or blame become harder to apply, since actions arise within engineered informational environments rather than solely from autonomous deliberation.
Shoshana Zuboff diagnoses a new economic order where firms treat human experience as "free raw material" that is transformed into "prediction products" to shape behaviour. This captures how surveillance capitalism systematically extracts a "behavioural surplus" (data beyond what is needed for service delivery) and converts it into commercial means of control. Heidegger’s critique in The Question Concerning Technology describes technology as a mode of revealing that "enframes" (Gestell) the world, reducing beings to "standing-reserve" for use. Read together, Zuboff’s empirical account and Heidegger’s ontological diagnosis show how digital infrastructures not only monetise personal life but also enact a technological revealing that redefines people as data resources to be calculated and optimised.
Heidegger worries that calculative thinking eclipses more primordial forms of understanding, since technology makes us see the world only in terms of utility:
"Everywhere we remain unfree and chained to technology, whether we passionately affirm or deny it."
Zuboff’s concept of "instrumentarian power" describes a parallel political and social consequence: firms do not merely predict behaviour but seek to "modify" and "shape" it, producing forms of control that erode individual autonomy and democratic norms. Combining the two perspectives clarifies that the threat of surveillance capitalism is not merely economic or legal but existential. Participants risk losing the capacity to disclose authentic possibilities for being because their choices are increasingly pre-empted by algorithmic interventions.
Where they diverge is instructive for response: Zuboff calls for institutional remedies — regulation, collective action, and legal frameworks — to curb the encroachments of surveillance capitalism, while Heidegger offers an ontological call to recover a different mode of revealing without providing concrete policy tools. As Heidegger writes, "Only a god can still save us"— a provocative insistence on the depth of transformation needed to overcome enframing, whereas Zuboff provides actionable steps aimed at democratic governance. Integrating them suggests a twofold strategy: use Heidegger to diagnose how technological revealing harms human world-disclosure and use Zuboff’s policy prescriptions to pursue democratic, institutional avenues that can resist and reframe the economic structures producing that harm.
In the philosophy of technology, Zuboff’s critique resonates with postphenomenological and Heideggerian worries that technologies mediate our relations to the world and disclose it in particular ways. Platforms do not merely facilitate exchange, they render human experience legible as quantifiable data, thereby reconfiguring practical reasons, social practices, and norms. This instrumentality is not neutral. Design choices and business logics embed economic imperatives that shape what is visible, valuable, and actionable within social life, transforming persons into inputs for predictive markets.
Commentary
In her introduction to The Age of Surveillance Capitalism (2019) Zuboff provides an analysis of modern capitalism. The central theme revolves around surveillance capitalism. This new form of capitalism trades in personal data, undermining individual autonomy in favour of corporate profits. Zuboff argues that powerful corporations exploit our digital lives to predict and control behaviour. This acts like a new architecture of power, leveraging our actions as raw material for their profit.
The reality is that this commodification of personal data threatens democracy and human nature itself. Zuboff introduces her concept of "behavioural surplus," the excess data generated from our online behavior. This surplus feeds into vast markets known as "behavioural futures markets." Here, our future decisions are bought and sold, effectively turning individuals into commodities. This exploitation reshapes our lives and profoundly impacts social norms, fueling inequality and curtailing autonomy.
Zuboff then elaborates on the mechanisms that sustain surveillance capitalism. Central to this phenomenon is how companies like Google and Facebook collect and use vast amounts of data. These companies exploit each interaction we make online, turning them into detailed behavioural profiles. The book details how advertisers are not the customers, but we, the users, are reduced to human resources exploited for behavioural predictions.
This transactional model prioritises profit over individual privacy. Zuboff highlights the duties of these corporations as they evolve from mere information aggregators to powerful entities that shape our actions through subtle nudges. She illustrates this control through various examples, such as online advertising targeting, which influences our thoughts and choices without our awareness. The tech giants craft environments designed to condition users into behaviour that benefits the corporation, rather than the individual. This manipulation raises vital ethical questions about free will and autonomy in decision-making.
The implications of surveillance capitalism stretch beyond economics. They pose profound social risks. Zuboff discusses how surveillance capitalism has shifted the balance of power dramatically. The once-solid barriers separating personal privacy, democratic oversight, and corporate interests are now crumbling. Moreover, Zuboff suggests that social media platforms cultivate a “hive” mentality, where conformity replaces individuality. This leads not only to a loss of personal identity but also to a normalisation of surveillance in everyday life. The constant feedback we receive is also designed to keep us engaged, perpetuating a vicious cycle of dependency. In this orchestrated environment, individuals often feel powerless, unaware of how deeply their freedoms are being compromised. The disconnect between feeling like a user and being manipulated into submission becomes evident. Zuboff underlines a critical loss: the right to sanctuary, where one can escape the wide range of commercial surveillance.
Instrumentarian power is pivotal to Zuboff’s argument. In stark contrast to totalitarian regimes that thrive on violence, instrumentarian power thrives on behavioural modification. Big corporations use data not only to inform but to influence. Their primary motive is to generate profit through behavioural control, affecting how we interact with broader society. Zuboff’s comparisons challenge readers to think critically about their dependency on digital technology. Her insights question the underpinnings of our economic systems, showing how they reinforce inequities and strip away individual freedom.
The digital landscape no longer serves merely as a tool for communication, it has become a labyrinth of entrapment leading to automated predicaments. She further examines how democratic structures have weakened under the weight of unregulated corporate power. The lack of accountability allows companies to operate without oversight, stripping citizens of their rights. As Zuboff illustrates, this has significant implications for future generations, who may grow up in an increasingly surveilled existence.
In her conclusion, Zuboff stresses the urgency of this moment. She argues that a reckoning is necessary to reclaim autonomy and privacy in our digital lives. Readers are left pondering: Who knows? Who decides? These questions encapsulate the challenges we face. Zuboff’s passionate call for resistance, the need to fight for a future without overwhelming commercial oversight, rings throughout the narrative. She adamantly advocates for a renewed sense of democratic responsibility, reminding us that our collective actions determine the trajectory of surveillance capitalism.
Zuboff’s work prompts normative responses about rights and justice. If surveillance capitalism erodes informational self-determination and democratic equality, then remedies must go beyond individualistic market fixes to structural interventions, new legal rights, stronger regulation, and collective mechanisms to reclaim informational commons and institutional accountability. Her account thus situates privacy, autonomy, and democratic governance as interlinked philosophical concerns requiring both conceptual reframing and public-political action.
Themes
Behavioural data as a commodity
"Behavioural data has become a new kind of raw material."
Zuboff frames everyday actions such as searches, clicks, location traces and likes, as commodities that companies harvest and refine. She explains that firms treat this behavioural raw material much like natural resources. It is extracted, processed, and transformed into prediction products that can be traded in markets. This reframing turns private, often mundane behaviour into a source of economic value.
Zuboff highlights the concept of "behavioural surplus", that is data collected beyond what is required to provide a service, as the key to this commodification. These surpluses are not incidental waste, they are the primary feedstock for predictive analytics. As she writes, companies deliberately design systems to produce surplus because "prediction products are the new currency" that advertisers, platforms, and other buyers are willing to purchase.
The commercialisation of behavioural data creates novel marketplaces and value chains. Zuboff notes how firms convert raw behavioural inputs into prediction products and then sell those products to third parties seeking to influence or anticipate human actions. This process produces instrumentarian power, the ability to shape behaviour for profit, by turning intimate details of everyday life into tradable assets.
Crucially, Zuboff stresses that commodifying behaviour is not neutral. It restructures relationships and social spaces. She warns that this market logic colonises the human sphere, converting friendships, family interactions, and civic participation into data points. The result is that personal experience is reframed as economic opportunity, with people reduced to inputs in a vast data-extraction economy.
The colonisation of the human experience
"Surveillance capitalism proceeds by the steady colonisation of the human experience."
Zuboff argues that markets once confined to goods and services now extend into the most intimate realms of life — friendships, family interactions, moods, and daily routines — because these domains yield valuable behavioural data. By treating personal experiences as "raw material," firms transform formerly private spaces into areas for extraction and monetisation.
She warns that this colonisation is both systematic and normalising. Companies redesign environments and interfaces to make human behaviour more visible and legible for analysis. Zuboff argues that these practices restructure social interactions so they become continual sources of "behavioural surplus". The consequence is a pervasive redefinition of social life according to the imperatives of data extraction.
The process also displaces human agency. As Zuboff affirms, when experiences are commodified:
"the play of human autonomy is subordinated to the aims of prediction and control."
People find their choices anticipated and shaped by predictive systems that monetise conformity and responsiveness. What was once spontaneous or private becomes a predictable input in markets that profit from steering future behaviour.
She emphasises the political and moral stakes: colonisation of the human sphere undermines democratic norms and the moral architecture of society. Zuboff insists that when essential aspects of being human are converted into instruments for profit,
"we trade away the dignity of the person for the sake of market logic."
This requires urgent civic and regulatory responses to reclaim the commons of human experience.
Surveillance as economic logic
"Surveillance is not an adjunct to capitalism; it has become its very logic."
This statement captures Zuboff's central claim that the collection and commodification of personal data are not mere features of digital services but the foundational mechanism through which value is created in contemporary firms. She shows how everyday interactions such as search queries and clicks, are treated as "behavioural raw material," harvested continuously and processed into prediction products that can be bought and sold. As Zuboff warns, this transforms private life into a new market form where human experience itself is converted into profit.
Companies design products explicitly to maximise data capture, building infrastructures she describes as "machineries of extraction".Interfaces, defaults, and engagement techniques are optimised, not primarily for user welfare but for generating more "behavioural surplus", data beyond what is necessary to provide a service. The result is a feedback loop: greater capture yields more predictive power, which yields greater profit, which then funds further capture and refinement.
This economic logic produces profound asymmetries. Zuboff notes an "asymmetry of knowledge" in which corporations amass detailed maps of human behaviour that individuals, and often democracies, cannot access or contest. Those who control the data thus gain disproportionate power to predict and shape futures, while users are left with diminished agency and little insight into how their lives are being monetised.
Because surveillance as economic logic scales so efficiently, it migrates across sectors like healthcare, education, retail and urban planning, normalising data extraction as standard practice. Zuboff characterises this spread as the "colonisation of the lifeworld," where previously nonmarket domains become profitable sources of raw material. The social and ethical externalities, loss of privacy, manipulation, weakened public institutions, are largely ignored by firms focused on monetisation.
Zuboff argues that this logic outpaces existing legal and social frameworks, creating what she calls a "regulatory and ethical gap". Without new governance mechanisms, she contends, surveillance capitalism will continue to reorganise society around extraction and prediction. Her call is for collective action and regulation to reclaim democratic control over how human behaviour is used and to restore individual autonomy.
Resistance
"Resistance is the precondition of liberty."
Zuboff insists that confronting surveillance capitalism requires active pushback. Citizens, journalists, scholars, and policymakers must expose extraction practices and mobilise public awareness. She argues that "public scrutiny is the oxygen of democracy" and that only through organised resistance can people reclaim the informational and moral ground ceded to private firms.
Zuboff frames regulation as essential, not optional. Surveillance capitalism exploits legal and institutional gaps, so "we need new laws to limit the market for human futures." She calls for rules that restrict the collection and trade of behavioural surplus, require transparency about prediction products, and give individuals meaningful control over how their data are used. Without such legal frameworks, she warns, the economic incentives for extraction will continue to outpace ethical restraint.
She also emphasises collective remedies. Consumer choices alone are insufficient because market power and information asymmetries make opting out impractical for most. Zuboff writes that "individual resistance without collective institutions is impotent" and advocates for democratic governance mechanisms, data trusts, public oversight, and enforceable privacy rights that can rebalance power between individuals and corporations.
Zuboff insists on a normative claim. Resisting surveillance capitalism is a moral obligation to defend human autonomy and dignity. She warns that unless society intervenes, we risk
"handing over the means of human self-determination to private interests."
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