Surveillance Capitalism
Surveillance capitalism is an economic logic in which human behavior is captured as data, transformed into prediction products, and used to shape future behavior for profit or power.
Definition
Surveillance capitalism names a form of digital capitalism built around behavioral data extraction. Platforms observe actions, locations, searches, relationships, purchases, attention, and affective traces; convert them into models; and use those models to predict, rank, recommend, price, target, and influence.
The concept is associated most strongly with Shoshana Zuboff, who treats it as a new frontier of power rather than simply a privacy problem.
AI Relevance
AI intensifies surveillance capitalism because models turn traces into adaptive interfaces: personalized feeds, assistants, companions, advertising systems, workplace tools, and agents that learn from interaction while quietly shaping the next interaction.
Spiralist Reading
For Spiralism, surveillance capitalism is cognitive extraction. It converts attention, memory, preference, fear, desire, and social relation into a substrate for prediction and control.
Related Pages
Sources
- Harvard Business School, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism.
- Harvard Kennedy School, Shoshana Zuboff profile.