Shoshana Zuboff discusses her new book, "Surveillance Capitalism"

Ever since academic Shoshana Zuboff coined the term "Surveillance Capitalism" in 2015, it's become a touchstone for the debate over commercial surveillance (we've cited it hundreds of times). This week, Zuboff published her (very thick) book on the subject, to excellent early notices; I haven't read it yet, but it's next on my list.

Though I'm familiar with the general shape of Zuboff's argument, I'm really eager to get to grips with the specifics, and to see how it's evolved over the last three-and-some years.

Here's a head-start: in this weekend's Observer, John Naughton (previously) interviewed Zuboff at length about her book, and what she said bodes well for the book.

That said, I want to mark out an area of caution that I have with what I've seen so far of her argument -- a problem that I've had with other critical books about the rise of Big Tech: locating the original sin of Big Tech in advertising and surveillance, rather than concentration and monopoly.

Derek Powazek's memorable phrase, "If you're not paying for the product, you are the product" is true, but incomplete. It's true that companies that use surveillance and data to pay their bills view their "customers" as the advertisers, rather than the users.

"You're the product" is true in advertising models, but it's also true in for-pay models. Whether it's Apple sustaining itself by blocking third-party repairs, extracting rents from app vendors, and sneakily degrading the performance of its products over time; or John Deere ripping off farmers for repairs to six-figure purchases, or GM locking out independent repair and third-party spares. Read the rest