Shoshana Zuboff

In the age of the smart machine: the future of work and power

A noted Harvard social scientist documents the pitfalls and promises of computerized technology in business life..

Big Other: Surveillance Capitalism and the Prospects of an Information Civilization

This article describes an emergent logic of accumulation in the networked sphere, ‘surveillance capitalism,’ and considers its implications for ‘information civilization.’ The institutionalizing practices and operational assumptions of Google Inc. are the primary lens for this analysis as they are rendered in two recent articles authored by Google Chief Economist Hal Varian. Varian asserts four uses that follow from computer-mediated transactions: ‘data extraction and analysis,’ ‘new contractual forms due to better monitoring,’ ‘personalization and customization,’ and ‘continuous experiments.’ An examination of the nature and consequences of these uses sheds light on the implicit logic of surveillance capitalism and the global architecture of computer mediation upon which it depends. This architecture produces a distributed and largely uncontested new expression of power that I christen: ‘Big Other.’ It is constituted by unexpected and often illegible mechanisms of extraction, commodification, and control that effectively exile persons from their own behavior while producing new markets of behavioral prediction and modification. Surveillance capitalism challenges democratic norms and departs in key ways from the centuries-long evolution of market capitalism.

The Emperor’s New Information Economy

According to the U.S. Commerce Department, 1990 was the first year in which capital spending relevant to the information economy (computers and telecommunications) exceeded capital spending on the more traditional aspects of the industrial infrastructure (plant, equipment, physical transportation, etc.). Many scholars and business-oriented commentators have greeted these data as evidence that the U.S. economy is now firmly rooted in the information age, that a new “information economy” has replaced the industrial economy that dominated most of the twentieth century.

Automatizar/informatizar: as duas faces da tecnologia inteligente

Advanced computer-based information technology is providing a new infrastructure that mediates many of the productive and communicative activities most central to organizational life.

Ciborra disclosed: aletheia in the life and scholarship of Claudio Ciborra

Received: 3 October 2005 Accepted: 3 October 2005 ‘Life is a mess.’ Such were the wise words once imparted to me by my vastly erudite professor of the history of religion, Jonathan Z Smith at the University of Chicago. I knew them to be ‘true’. Even in my infancy as a scholar, I was repelled by the geometrification of human experience and drawn instead to the philosophers of the messy: Husserl, Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, Gendlin. These thinkers were not intimidated by the intricacy and ‘lightness’ of being. Instead of finding it unbearable, they embraced the naked pilgrimage to raw phenomena. In that pilgrimage, stripped of intellectual armor, one must use one’s self to feel. Fully alive, one strives to keep one’s eyes wide open, to apprehend without prejudice, and – hardest of all – to unearth the words that justly reveal the meaning in the mess: One thinks of Merleau Ponty’s famous ‘notched like a lentil’ and Gendlin’s ‘felt meaning’. I did not appreciate at the time how much these initiations and revelations would burn into me and mark me forever as an epistemological exile from the main streams in my discipline(s), and, indeed, in life itself. Allegiance to the intricate lentil-like phenomenon of one’s own experience is a deserted departure lounge in the increasingly populous, frantic, cacophonic, and scientistic mass transit of social science research. A pattern eventually emerged in which I became a magnet for, and was magnetized by, scholars and students who were, somehow, fellow travelers. It was in this way, carving out a solitary career, that I first met Claudio Ciborra a quarter of a century ago. I don’t remember how we met or who introduced us. He was at MIT on a fellowship and an ardent devotee of the lectures of Roberto Unger at the Harvard Law School. Our first conversation was about ‘formative context’ and other aspects of Unger’s world view that captivated Claudio. I can see him leaning against the wall, his head nearly grazing the ceiling of my tiny assistant professor’s office in the old Baker Library at the Harvard Business School. His presence was always an engaging puzzle to me, at once elegant, austere, and slightly goofy; his brilliant classicist’s mind frequently shaded into that of the playful child. He dissented from the taken for granted routines one associates with adulthood and career. The precise contours of his life were elusive and ambiguous. He was a nomad. He took on different personae, depending on time and place and people – never one-dimensional, always polymorphic. He roamed countries, disciplines, and groups; he devoured and imparted; he played a significant part in each place and a central part in none (until, I think, he arrived at his beloved LSE). Often the stranger, he depended upon hospitality and was always quick to offer it too, though in his own unusual ways – conference organizer, restaurant and tour guide, menu advisor, intellectual critic. The mutual appreciation that grew between Claudio and me over the years was largely tacit. I don’t recall any careful discussions of the epistemological allegiances that bound us. We simply recognized in each European Journal of Information Systems (2005) 14, 470–473 & 2005 Operational Research Society Ltd. All rights reserved 0960-085X/05

In the Age of the Smart Machine

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