You are not the customer. You are the raw material.
That sentence sounds like an accusation. Shoshana Zuboff spent a career making it a documented finding.
I met her work through the VPRO Tegenlicht documentary, and then through The Age of Surveillance Capitalism. I have not read all of her books — The Support Economy is still on my shelf — but the concept did what only a great concept can do: it gave a name to something I felt and could not articulate.
The malignant mutation
Zuboff’s claim is not that advertising got out of hand. It is that a new economic order appeared inside capitalism and grew out of it.
Her phrase: a malignant mutation of capitalism.
That is a precise choice of words. Not a bug. Not a few bad actors. A mutation — the same organism, with the same logic of accumulation, now feeding on a resource that was never for sale: human experience.
Our behaviour is the free raw material. It is processed into predictions about what we will do next. Those predictions are sold. That is the loop.
Why this is not totalitarianism — and why that matters
The easy frame is 1984: cameras, secret police, obedience. Zuboff says the danger is different, and I think this is her most useful contribution.
Totalitarian power wants to change you. It needs your obedience and it needs to be seen. It rules through terror.
She names the new form instrumentarian power: power that does not need your obedience at all. It needs your behaviour, and the instruments to tune it. No terror. No secret police. Just machines that nudge the next action, quietly, at scale.
That is why it is so hard to protest. There is nothing to point at. Nobody is knocking on the door. The system works best when it is invisible — and we are the ones holding the door open.
The power of naming things
What I admire most in Zuboff is her use of language. She does not describe a problem, she builds the vocabulary for it:
- surveillance capitalism — the economic system
- instrumentarian power — the form of power it exercises
- the division of learning — knowledge divided the way labour once was
- the means of behavioural modification — the productive asset
- the action economy — what is actually being traded
- the automate-informate dialectic — from her earlier work on computers and work
New words for a new reality. And that is the point: you cannot resist what you cannot name. Most of us had the uneasy feeling. She built the language that turns it into an argument.
She is retired from Harvard now. Her clarity is not.
What this means for a founder
I am not running a data empire, and neither are the entrepreneurs I work with. So why does this matter?
Because the extraction logic is not confined to tech. It shows up whenever a company takes something from people — attention, time, data, flexibility, loyalty — that they did not knowingly give. The mechanism does not need to be surveillance. It only needs the assumption that what is not explicitly refused is free to take.
Her question is a good audit for any business:
What are we taking from people — employees, customers, suppliers — that they did not knowingly give? And what would we change if they could see it?
That question connects directly to the work I do on equal worth: three ladders, not one.
- Certainty — does my team know what we stand for?
- Decision power — can they decide without me?
- A share — do they share in what we create?
A company that climbs all three does not need to extract from people to be profitable. That is not softness. It is a more durable business model, because it does not depend on people not noticing.
The habit
Once a week, ask one question you were afraid to ask. Then listen without defending yourself.
Zuboff’s work started with questions about things everybody else had accepted as normal. Yours can start there too.
Sources
- Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power (2019)
- Shoshana Zuboff & James Maxmin, The Support Economy: Why Corporations Are Failing Individuals and the Next Episode of Capitalism (2002)
- Shoshana Zuboff, In the Age of the Smart Machine: The Future of Work and Power (1988)
- VPRO Tegenlicht documentary featuring Zuboff: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hIXhnWUmMvw
- The Social Dilemma (2020), in which Zuboff appears
- https://shoshanazuboff.com/
- https://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shoshana_Zuboff
Photo: Alexander von Humboldt Institut, CC BY 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons — https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Shoshana_Zuboff_at_Alexander_von_Humboldt_Institut.jpg
