Feb 2019

Zuboff is the Charles Edward Wilson Professor emerita at Harvard Business School. She has a PhD in social psychology and a BA in philosophy.

Zuboff writes both with an alarming urgency as well as with a beautiful moral clarity. It is interesting to see the rise of writers like this who approach analysis of the digital era from a human, philosophical perspective. It highlights the broadening of the conversation beyond that of the technical. She examines the exploding ‘attention economy’ through the prism of the capitalist model referring to our attention and time as the currency.

With such an abundance of this ‘natural resource’ she points to the fundamental misalignment between the goals of this emergent attention economy and the goals we have for ourselves as humans. The book comprehensively, and terrifyingly, lays bare the price we are all paying with power accumulated and knowledge concentrated in a handful of industry giants with little or no democratic oversight.

The book has been described as likely to join Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations and Max Weber’s Economy and Society as a defining social-economic text. We live in a world where those who hungrily hoover up our data specifically engineer their activities to keep us ignorant. Books like this that lay bare the sheer scale and impact of that activity will almost certainly be read by future generations and will be remarked upon as either the moment where our eyes were opened, or as the moment where we threw away the opportunity to reclaim ourselves.

Zuboff concludes by saying “the Berlin Wall fell for many reasons, but above all it was because the people of East Berlin said, “No more!”. We too can be the authors of many ‘great and beautiful’ new facts that reclaim the digital future as humanity’s home. No more! Let this be our declaration.”