It’s not just that our online behavior is being surveilled large, powerful, and persuasive corporations are “tuning” and “taming” us to maximize their profits.

But, she concludes, our devices aren’t just watching us they’re influencing us, without our awareness, toward market goals. Zuboff goes into penetrating detail about a fact we all take for granted today: our devices are watching us. Just as the Ford Motor Company emerged from Industrial Capitalism, so Google and Facebook (what’s called “Big Data”) emerged from SC. Surveillance Capitalism (SC) is her term for the new form that capitalism has taken since the digital revolution began. Her argument is nothing less than overwhelming. The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power, is her career capstone publication, presenting the cumulative insight of her scholarship in just short of 700 pages. She is a contemporary prophet for discerning our digital times. Her framework for understanding “surveillance capitalism” and “instrumentarian power” are widely regarded as foundational. She has been profoundly influential in her study of the digital revolution and how it has shaped capitalism and human society. Shoshana Zuboff is a social psychologist and philosopher who taught for over three decades at Harvard’s Business and Law schools. Then they must be torn down from their thrones for the purpose of renewed human flourishing. The Old Testament prophets (and even Jesus himself) consistently remind us to wisely discern when our creations gain too much power and begin to dominate us. Yet, as Genesis 3-11 makes abundantly clear, human beings distort and misdirect this capacity and fill the earth with dehumanizing and dominating idolatry instead.

The opening creation narratives in Genesis 1-2 lay the foundation for understanding the human capacity for culture-making.

The age of surveillance