Shoshana Zuboff

This entry explores the scholarship of Shoshana Zuboff, an academic working across social psychology and critical digital studies. Dealing with recent transformations of capitalism, Zuboff’s work offers a window into the perennial cyberpunk themes of digitalization, data surveillance, automation, and individual freedom in a world increasingly dominated by techno-capital. These themes are examined in In the Age of the Smart Machine: The Future of Work and Power, although it is the recent The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power that firmly establishes Zuboff’s work as key to cyberpunk culture. Here Zuboff describes “surveillance capitalism” as a “rogue mutation of capitalism,” “a parasitic economic logic” which “claims human experience as free raw material for hidden commercial practices of extraction, prediction, and sales” (Surveillance Capitalism frontispiece). This brief description signals alignment with cyberpunk and its dystopian extrapolations of a world largely subsumed under capitalist logic.