It has no intention of sending people to knock on your doors in the middle of the night, to drag you to the gulag or the camp.

“This new power does not employ jackbooted soldiers to threaten us with terror and murder. We are learning how to write the music - and then we let the music make them dance,’” Zuboff said.

“One scientist described it, ‘We can engineer the context around a particular behavior and force change that way. In recent years, governments have caught on to the potential of monitoring citizens and shaping their behavior, with troubling implications for religious and ethnic minorities who might be targeted, as reportedly has been happening in China. Zuboff shared several examples, such as advertisers creating stops in the Pokemon Go game to generate foot traffic to their stores, a Facebook proposal to alert advertisers when analytics indicate a consumer’s brand loyalty is in jeopardy, allowing them to head off the switch to another product, and the data-collecting plans that - before public outcry - were part of Google’s planned 12-acre “smart city” development in Toronto. Increasingly that data has been used not just to analyze behavior but to predict it, and, most worrisome, to change it. The root of the trouble, she said, is that instead of viewing that shared information as a public good - to be used to improve individual lives and society - it has been used to gain money and power. What alarms Zuboff so much is not the digitization of information per se but rather the claims of ownership that major internet companies have put on the data, including that from millions of consumers, and its subsequent use. “It’s like watching a slow-motion train wreck.” “I feel like my entire adult life has been spent in observation of this epistemic trauma,” Zuboff said. Today, she said, virtually all of the world’s information is in digital format. Zuboff said that 2007 was a watershed year when digitization of the world’s information was largely complete, having climbed from 1 percent of global information in 1986 - including words, cultural assets, laws, languages - to 25 percent in 2000 to 97 percent in 2007. Zuboff, an emerita Harvard Business School professor and internet privacy advocate, said the outpouring of concern she’s seen at stop after stop on what has been a 14-month speaking tour for her latest book has given her hope that people are finally waking up to the dangers of freely sharing their data with tech companies like Facebook and Google. For the first time since 2007, Shoshana Zuboff is feeling optimistic.

The age of surveillance capitalism book