CoChat
Sign Up
Cited by 764Cultural Studies and PostmodernismEthics and Social Impacts of AIPrivacy, Security, and Data Protection

The Age of Surveillance Capitalism

Zuboff, Shoshana·2023·Social Theory Re-Wired
DOI 10.4324/9781003320609-27
Open this paper in CoChat — free account

Abstract

Behavioral surplus defines Google’s earnings success. In 2016, 89 percent of the revenues of its parent company, Alphabet, derived from Google’s targeted advertising programs. The scale of raw-material flows is reflected in Google’s domination of the internet, processing over 40,000 search queries every second on average: more than 3.5 billion searches per day and 1.2 trillion searches per year worldwide in 2017. Instrumentarian power cultivates an unusual “way of knowing” that combines the “formal indifference” of the neoliberal worldview with the observational perspective of radical behaviorism. Instrumentarianism and Big Other signal the transformation of the market into a project of total certainty, an undertaking that is unimaginable outside the digital milieu, but also unimaginable outside the logic of accumulation that is surveillance capitalism. In the US, local law enforcement has joined the queue of institutions seeking access to instrumentarian power.

Integrity signals

Registry

Crossref · 10.4324/9781003320609-27

Cites

Statistics

Recomputing p-values needs the paper’s full text.

Claims the paper makes

This paper’s full text isn’t openly available, so its claims and self-check weren’t run. The registry and citation checks still apply.

Claims other papers make about this one

Each is checked against this paper’s own text: does it say what the citing paper says it does?

  • The prevailing business model of many technology companies relies on maximising time-on-platform and harvesting vast quantities of user data to feed algorithmic recommendation systems and monetise attention through targeted advertising.

    “The prevailing business model of many technology companies relies on maximising time-on-platform and harvesting vast quantities of user data to feed algorithmic recommendation systems and monetise attention through targeted advertising (Zuboff, 2023).”

    From Virtual Reality Risks for Children in the Metaverse: An Examination through Criminological Perspectives (2026) · cites this paper as Zuboff, 2023

  • Some commercial platforms continue to prioritise user engagement and data extraction over ethical responsibility.

    “Meanwhile, some commercial platforms continue to prioritise user engagement and data extraction over ethical responsibility.”

    From Virtual Reality Risks for Children in the Metaverse: An Examination through Criminological Perspectives (2026) · cites this paper as Zuboff, 2023

  • This will enable exploitation of consumers' biases or vulnerabilities in order to capture more of the consumer surplus via price discrimination or violations of consumer privacy, leading to "surveillance capitalism".

    “This will enable exploitation of consumers’ biases or vulnerabilities in order to capture more of the consumer surplus via price discrimination or violations of consumer privacy, leading to “surveillance capitalism” (9, 10).”

    From The impact of generative artificial intelligence on socioeconomic inequalities and policy making (2024) · cites this paper as [10]

Cited by

Sorted by citations

Related

Authors
Zuboff, S.
Corresponding author
Zuboff, Shoshana
Venue
Social Theory Re-Wired
Publisher
Routledge
Published
2023-04-28
Pages
203-213
DOI
10.4324/9781003320609-27
OpenAlex
W3143251375
Cited by
764
References
0
Citations by year
2026: 201 · 2025: 151 · 2024: 111 · 2023: 31 · 2022: 45 · 2021: 98 · 2020: 98 · 2019: 29
FWCI
717.74
Type
book chapter
Language
en
Open access
closed
Locations
Routledge eBooks (publishedVersion)
Topics
  • Social Sciences › Communication › Cultural Studies and Postmodernism
  • Social Sciences › Safety Research › Ethics and Social Impacts of AI
  • Social Sciences › Sociology and Political Science › Privacy, Security, and Data Protection
Keywords
surveillance capitalism, targeted advertising, Google, alphabet, radical behaviorism, neoliberalism, Big Other, search engines, law enforcement access to data, digital capitalism

About these checks

Registry, retraction, Cites and statistics results are computed, not judged, with one exception: a printed reference that no index lists is read once by a model before it counts as a citation error. Claims are extracted by a model and kept only when their quote appears verbatim in the text; each cited source is then checked, with a model’s help, for whether it says what the claim relies on. Those verdicts can be wrong — read the claim’s quote and the cited source before relying on one.

Statistics and arithmetic are recomputed, not judged.

Confidence bands are shown only for fields calibrated on our annotated test set. None is calibrated yet, so no band is shown.

What counts as a claim ›How we measure confidence ›How we check this ›

Are you an author, or do you see a problem with this page? Request a review