40 Quotes by Shoshana Zuboff

Every century or so, fundamental changes in the nature of consumption create new demand patterns that existing enterprises can’t meet.

Paradiso imagines a society in which it falls to each individual to protect herself from the omniscient ubiquitous sensate computational systems of the new apparatus. Rather than paradise, it seems a recipe for a new breed of madness. Yet this is precisely the world that is now under construction around us, and this madness appears to be a happy feature of the plan.

Computer mediation seems to bathe action in a more conditional light: perhaps it happened; perhaps it didn’t. Without the layeredrichness of direct sensory engagement, the symbolic medium seems thin, flat, and fragile.

What would hold society together in the absence of the rules and rituals of clan and kin? Durkheim’s answer was the division of labor.

Technology represents intelligence systematically applied to the problem of the body. It functions to amplify and surpass the organic limits of the body; it compensates for the body’s fragility and vulnerability...

Technological change defines the horizon of our material world as it shapes the limiting conditions of what is possible and what is barely imaginable. It erodesassumptions about the nature of our reality, the “pattern” in which we dwell, and lays open new choices.

Google is a shape-shifter, but each shape harbors the same aim: to hunt and capture raw material. Baby, won’t you ride my car? Talk to my phone? Wear my shirt? Use my map? In all these cases the varied torrent of creative shapes is the sideshow to the main event: the continuous expansion of the extraction architecture to acquire raw material at scale to feed an expensive production process that makes prediction products that attract and retain more customers.

Google had discovered a way to translate its nonmarket interactions with users into surplus raw material for the fabrication of products aimed at genuine market transactions with its real customers: advertisers.94 The translation of behavioral surplus from outside to inside the market finally enabled Google to convert investment into revenue. The corporation thus created out of thin air and at zero marginal cost an asset class of vital raw materials derived from users’ nonmarket online behavior.

Labor came to humanity with the fall from grace and was at best a penitential sacrifice enabling purity through humiliation. Laborwas toil, distress, trouble, fatigue – an exertion both painful and compulsory. Labor was our animal condition, struggling to survive in dirt and darkness.