Shoshana Zuboff
Theorist of 'surveillance capitalism' — the framework for critiquing corporate data power.
Shoshana Zuboff is a social psychologist and the Charles Edward Wilson Professor Emerita at Harvard Business School, best known for her 2019 book The Age of Surveillance Capitalism. She coined 'surveillance capitalism' to describe an economic logic built on covertly extracting human behavioral data to predict and shape behavior. As of 2026 she co-directs a Carr-Ryan Center fellowship at the Harvard Kennedy School on 'Surveillance Capitalism or Democracy?' and warns of a 'fusion scenario' merging authoritarian state power with corporate surveillance.
Latest posts
Friends, I'm greeting 2023 by sharing new work on #SurveillanceCapitalism vs. #Democracy. It's a death match of global orders. Only one survives. Here's how: https://t.co/xzRzcfW1Uu @mariaressa @MazzucatoM @vestager @OrgTheoryJrnl
3y ago · 136 likes
Please! Let's take the energy directed toward Elon and redirect it toward those we elected to govern. Link arms and insist on a democratic digital future where we are protected from unaccountable power wielded by billionaires, despots, corporations, or governments. [6/6]
4y ago · 476 likes
Welcome to democracy's abdication of our information and communication spaces to private ownership and #SurveillanceCapitalism where the emperors have all the clothes and we run naked. Paradoxically, no democracy can survive these conditions [5/6]
4y ago · 273 likes
What's going on here? This is #SurveillanceCapitalism, where corrupt information is more profitable than truth. Without new rights and laws to guarantee democratic principles in this digital century, our pleas for pro-social corporate behavior are hopeless.[4/6]
4y ago · 315 likes
The strongest case
The dominant business model of the digital economy is the covert extraction of human experience as behavioral data to predict and modify behavior, a novel and concentrated form of power that erodes individual autonomy and democratic self-rule and cannot be fixed by privacy tweaks alone.
And against
Critics argue 'surveillance capitalism' overgeneralizes from a handful of ad-tech firms into a totalizing theory, understates user agency and the value people receive, is thin on testable mechanisms and concrete policy, and recycles earlier political-economy critiques without fully crediting them.
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On the record: no documented legal record found in a primary source.