Zuboff raises a legitimate concern in her book. Today the same practices meet little resistance or even discussion as they are routinely and pervasively deployed in the march toward surveillance revenues’ (25). ‘The evidence of our psychic numbing is that only a few decades ago US society denounced mass behavior-modification techniques as unacceptable threats to individual autonomy and the democratic order. It does not seem that the author wishes to criticize the goodness of technological development, but rather to aspire to a better use of that development, in view of the common good. This author wishes to emphasize that technological development should not inevitably imply a ‘utilitarian’ use of technology, where users have to accept that technology carries some risks, which they accept in order to use it. While the growth of this industry is very positive for society, the lack of clarity and transparency in the way our private information is used for economic gain is very harmful. Zuboff suggests that there is a common confusion between the benefits of technological development and the abuse that the owners of this development exercise in our day. Social networks and the internet must be oriented towards the common good ‘I consider surveillance capitalism’s operations as a challenge to the elementary right to the future tense, which accounts for the individual’s ability to imagine, intend, promise, and construct a future’ (25).ġ. The social institutions of the digital world use and control us to obtain economic results, hence the title ‘surveillance capitalism’. ‘The fact that what is called the technological development of modern times has been so largely oriented economically to profit-making is one of the fundamental facts of the history of technology’ (22). Zuboff takes up this urgency a few centuries later to remind us that the use of digital tools is neither neutral nor innocuous, but responds to the economic design of those who own these tools. The old books of political philosophy that proposed to free the individual from social institutions, as Jean-Jacques Rousseau and his disciples did in their day, also had a warning tone.
It is not difficult to suppose that the author seeks to free us from the institutional control exercised, in this case, by the Internet industry and social networks.
This book by Shoshana Zuboff, professor emeritus at Harvard Business School, can be counted among the studies that denounce the existence of social oppression of the individual.
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