Surveillance capitalism

Lens adapted to this topic: Critical account and evidence for its concerns

The critical account treats surveillance capitalism as a distinctive profit logic built around appropriating personal experience, converting it into data, and using it to predict or influence behavior. It argues that this model concentrates knowledge and power, weakens privacy and autonomy, and can undermine democratic accountability. Some related scholarship accepts serious harms but attributes them less to capitalism itself than to unregulated corporate surveillance and inequality.

• Surveillance capitalism is presented as a new logic of accumulation in which private experience is translated into commodities, including behavioral predictions traded in markets.
• The model is argued to have spread beyond a few technology firms into a broader surveillance-based economic order.
• Critics warn that behavioral monitoring, targeting, and modification can threaten autonomy, privacy, democratic oversight, and the conditions of free societies.
• A governance-focused version of the critique holds that the central danger is unfettered corporate surveillance and the inequalities it reveals or exacerbates, rather than capitalism in the abstract.

Lens adapted to this topic: Challenges to the framework and its risk claims

Revisionist and defensive scholarship argues that “surveillance capitalism” can function as a broad master frame that bundles together distinct technologies, markets, and political problems. It questions whether Zuboff’s propositions are sufficiently grounded or causally precise, and argues that critics overstate harms involving targeted advertising, politics, mental health, government surveillance, social trust, and privacy. This view does not deny data collection, but disputes the framework’s scope and explanatory force.

• A critique of the thesis argues that its popularity has outpaced critical scrutiny and challenges six of its central propositions within digital political economy.
• Some reviewers argue that Zuboff’s account is too sweeping, insufficiently connected to relevant scholarship, and vulnerable to tautological reasoning about why firms engage in surveillance.
• A defensive account argues that common claims about surveillance capitalism’s harms are unfounded or exaggerated across areas including advertising, politics, mental health, government surveillance, trust, and privacy.
• An alternative explanation locates major harms in poor governance and inequality, arguing that surveillance itself is not inherently good or evil and can have legitimate uses.
• The framework remains contested even among critics, with some arguing that the important issue is the substantive risk posed by data-driven power rather than the precise definition of the term.