THE AGE OF SURVEILLANCE CAPITALISM:
The fight for a human future at the new frontier of power
By Shoshana Zuboff
Profile Books. 691 pages. £10.99
ISBN 978 1 781 256 855
The 21st century is already the digital century. The internet and its search engines have opened up an extraordinary abundance of new possibilities. We innocently revel in it all. But is it time to take action in terms of digital self-defence? This book, by a Professor Emerita from Harvard Business School, published last January, answers with a resounding ‘Yes!’
Companies like Google, Facebook and Amazon are not only shutting down our High Streets, but inexorably moving towards knowing far too much about us. Through our use of their services, data is harvested and processed using statistical methods related to behavioural science, to produce profiles of us which are such that they literally know more about us than we do of ourselves. This, of course, is exploited for financial gain. Such profiles are sold to advertisers and those with political interests who wish to influence us. In the eyes of the author of this book this is beginning to pose a threat to what it means to be human – something in which Christians ought to be intensely interested.
The re-emergence of heavy shepherds
What would you think if you received a letter from your church leaders that read like this? ‘Are church members …