American social psychologist and emerita professor at Harvard Business School whose 2019 book The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power is the most ambitious attempt to date to name, describe, and situate historically the economic logic of Google, Facebook, and their successors. Zuboff had spent thirty years studying the digitization of work (her 1988 In the Age of the Smart Machine was a foundational text of that earlier moment) before turning, in retirement, to what she came to see as a categorical shift in the nature of capitalism itself.
Her argument is that around 2001 — under the pressure of the dot-com crash and the post-9/11 surveillance opening — Google discovered that the exhaust data of human online behavior, originally treated as a byproduct useful only for improving services, could be separated, aggregated, and sold as predictions of future behavior to advertisers and others. This "behavioral surplus," extracted without meaningful consent, became the raw material of a new economic order: surveillance capitalism, in which the primary commodity is not goods, services, or even attention, but predictions of what people will do next, sold in markets Zuboff calls "behavioral futures markets." The logic drives inexorably toward more extraction, more intimate data, and eventually toward shaping behavior rather than merely predicting it — "instrumentarian power," in her term, distinct from both totalitarianism and ordinary market coercion.
Zuboff frames the whole arrangement as a Polanyian "unprecedented" — a development that cannot be understood through prior economic categories and that, like industrial capitalism before it, will either be civilized by democratic counter-movement or will hollow out the conditions of democratic self-rule. Her prose is dense and her scope enormous, which has drawn both admiration and criticism; but the book shifted the terms of the tech-policy debate, and the phrase "surveillance capitalism" has entered general use.