I personally share her skepticism, but not her "inevitabilism", to use her term.
But where Zuboff loses me is her exaggeration of their hold on society, of how much change they can carry out, and of how powerless most people are.
The antagonists of her story are Facebook and Google, and their grand ambitions in business jargon for human society. Zuboff is best when she does the work of journalism and digs through patent files and internal documents. Legal regimes on monopolies or privacy law do not encompass the current situation - and who reads the terms of service anyway? All of this is sent to "behavioral futures markets", and the general public simply does not know their personal information is treated this way. Exercise equipment, thermostats, refrigerators, phones, mattresses, and doorknobs are connected to the internet.
The problem lies in what is referred to as the "internet of things" - household objects or new device which track more of the user's location and behavior. On Goodreads, this is benign - I can talk about books with friends for free, and I get recommended new ones. The users of a website are not the consumer, they are the product, as their use data and product history is sold to big marketers or advertising firms. It is still a term that can refer to the bargain that users make when they use free websites such as this. "Surveillance capitalism", a term the author coined, is not all imagined. She turns to a metaphor of the Taino before meeting Columbus, as they were wholly ignorant of the atrocities of war he was about to unleash upon them. Zuboff refers to "overthrow", the end of democracy as we know it, the reshaping of all human nature. This is the kind of outrage that could be expected from a Berkeley or NYU sociology department, but seeing this from a Professor Emeritus of the Harvard Business School raises attention. Ur lives are scraped and sold to fund their freedom and our subjugation, their knowledge and our ignorance about what they know.
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