You Are the Object of a Secret Extraction Operation

As we move into the third decade of the 21st century, surveillance capitalism is the dominant economic institution of our time. Dr. Shoshana Zuboff, professor emeritus at Harvard Business School and the author of The Age of Surveillance Capitalism -says “Facebook is not just any corporation. It reached trillion-dollar status in a single decade by applying the logic of what I call surveillance capitalism — an economic system built on the secret extraction and manipulation of human data — to its vision of connecting the entire world. No secret extraction means no illegitimate concentrations of knowledge about people. No concentrations of knowledge means no targeting algorithms. No targeting means that corporations can no longer control and curate information flows and social speech or shape human behavior to favor their interests. Regulating extraction would eliminate the surveillance dividend and with it the financial incentives for surveillance. “By Shoshana Zuboff © 2021 The New York Times Company”. Image by: Shira Inbar