Shoshana Zuboff

American social psychologist — the theorist of surveillance capitalism

Harvard Business School · United States · d. 18 November 1951 (New England, United States)

Named the thing in 2019: surveillance capitalism, which takes the exhaust of human behaviour as free raw material, refines it into prediction products and sells certainty about what people will do next. She calls that raw material behavioural surplus, and the regime built on it instrumentarian power. Her 1988 study of computerised work, In the Age of the Smart Machine, had already seen the shift coming.

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Record

Life: b. 18 November 1951 (New England, United States) — living
Country: United States
Period: Contemporary
Affiliation: Harvard Business School
Areas: Social theory, Philosophy of technology, Political economy, Ethics of information
Major works: In the Age of the Smart Machine: The Future of Work and Power (1988)
The Support Economy: Why Corporations Are Failing Individuals and the Next Episode of Capitalism (2002)
A Digital Declaration (2014)
Big Other: Surveillance Capitalism and the Prospects of an Information Civilization (2015)
The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power (2019)
The Coup We Are Not Talking About (2021)
Key concepts: Surveillance capitalism, Behavioural surplus, Instrumentarian power, Big Other, The division of learning in society, Informate, The epistemic coup
Influenced by: Hannah Arendt, Max Weber, Émile Durkheim, Karl Polanyi
Sources: Harvard Business School, Shoshana Zuboff faculty profile
Wikipedia, Shoshana Zuboff
Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society, Shoshana Zuboff

Stories

Contemporary Philosophers

Varoufakis's technofeudalism and the claim that it is still capitalism

Yanis Varoufakis says capitalism is dead and that 'cloud capital' now extracts rent from digital fiefs rather than profit from markets. We set out the technofeudalism thesis as an argument to be tested, then weigh the strongest objections from Morozov, Snow and Gane, and Varoufakis's 2026 reply to his Marxist critics.

David Harvey, Karl Marx, Shoshana Zuboff

Newsroom3 October 2026

Agenda

The ownership question: property, labour and the economics of artificial intelligence

Strip away the talk of minds and machines and a plainer question sits underneath artificial intelligence: who owns the compute, the data and the models, and who keeps the returns. The labour evidence is more modest than the valuations assume, and the disagreement among economists is real.