Shoshana Zuboff, philosopher: ‘AI is surveillance capitalism continuing to evolve and expand’

Shoshana Zuboff (New England, U.S., 1951) joins the video call from her home in Maine, in the northeastern United States, on the border with Canada, where the cold is relentless at this time of year. She sips tea to warm her throat and apologizes for being late; her schedule is so packed these days that it was impossible to find an opportunity to do this interview in person. It is difficult to speak with Zuboff, the leading thinker on surveillance capitalism, via Google Meet and not feel anxious about contributing to the very evil she has been talking about for years.

“There are very few things left in this world that we can do without contributing to it. That’s what makes it intolerable,” says the philosopher and professor emeritus at Harvard Business School. Next January will mark seven years since she published her book The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, in which she uncovered a phenomenon that has since expanded almost unchecked: the collection and commodification of personal data by technology companies.

Technology and capitalism are two ideas that have been constantly present in Zuboff’s work. But she is particularly concerned about the current state of our society, with the rapid expansion of artificial intelligence and leaders such as Donald Trump embracing the tech oligarchs. So much so that her next book, which she hopes to publish in 2026, will be an update of her 2019 work, but focused on artificial intelligence.

Question. What do you think about AI? How do you view this technological development?

Answer. AI is simply surveillance capitalism continuing to evolve and expand with some new methodologies, but still based on theft. We rushed to the internet, thinking of the democratization of knowledge and communication. But what we ran to with open arms has actually become a surveillance prison with no bars or guards, but also no exit, no escape. And unless and until our democratic governments pull themselves together, and we come together in new forms of collective action to put that pressure on our public leaders, this will not change.

Q. How will the time we spend connected here for this video call contribute to surveillance capitalism?

A. The problem is we don’t know. That’s why it’s called surveillance capitalism because its core methods have to be hidden. Because if people knew what was happening, everybody would rebel. Google started out by stumbling into the discovery that every time someone engages with their search engine, they leave behind private data that can be analyzed to understand their behavior and predict it. That’s how we started to become a repository for very rich multifaceted data that gave Google, very early on, the ability to predict a person’s sexual orientation, political orientation, economic or cultural status... That became the foundation for their business that changed the world, because they realized that predictions of human behavior could be sold.

Q. Why must their core methods remain hidden?

A. At the beginning, Google had a very small executive team, and there was a growing conflict within. Some people said, we’re secretly taking people’s data, if folks find out about this, they’re going to be furious; we have to tell them. But the other side said, if we tell people what we’re doing, they will never forgive us. In I’m Feeling Lucky, Douglas Edwards, the first brand manager at Google, writes about a meeting where this argument was going on between the two factions. And Larry Page, the founder, was sitting there very quiet, listening. When they were done arguing, he just said: “We can never tell them.” He understood that they were stealing. And they were terrified of one thing then, and it’s the same thing they’re terrified of now: the law. That it would come into their sphere and say: this is illegal, this is theft, you can’t do this.

Q. Have we made any progress of note in combating surveillance capitalism since you published your book in 2019?

A. We have, and Europe is at the forefront. Some very significant things have happened in Europe during these years: the Digital Services Act, the Digital Markets Act, the AI Act. But EU leaders are currently having a moment of self-doubt. They don’t know if it would be better to simply appease Trump, or if it is wiser to stand by the very important laws that they have created.

Q. The president has been insulting European leaders recently, as have members of his administration, who have criticized the EU for some of its measures against Big Tech.

A. It’s because they are afraid of Europe. We’ve established that the only thing that they fear is law, and the only place where that law would be coming from any time in the near future is Europe. So they insult them and degrade them to confuse them. But if I could persuade the leaders of the EU of anything is that this is the time to be fierce.

Q. The U.S. is at the opposite side of the spectrum when compared to the EU: almost a year ago, Trump was sworn in surrounded by tech oligarchs.

A. I think of the inauguration as a wedding ceremony, a marriage between Trump and the tech leaders. Why did these men, who are infinitely wealthy and powerful, who control all the world’s data, information and knowledge, need to marry Trump? Both sides needed something that only the other could give them. The tech companies needed a world where there are no laws, where no one could tell them that this is unacceptable and incompatible with democracy. Only Trump can give them that. Only he has the twisted personality that allows him to walk up to any president of any country, any parliament, and say: I don’t accept your laws. And what did Trump need from them? A world in which the whole informational space is dominated by lies.

Q. Is this marriage what you have called “fusion scenarios”?

A. These are scenarios where the surveillance and data gathering capabilities of the private sector and those of the public sector fuse, as in the Chinese case. That’s when it becomes very dangerous. We are on our way toward that scenario in the U.S., which is why this is the moment when our European leaders must show up. This is not the time when we abandon all of that hard work.

Q. You mentioned the case of China, but under Trump, the U.S. is experiencing an expansion of government surveillance of civilians as his administration ramps up immigration enforcement. What is the difference — or the relationship — between government surveillance and surveillance capitalism?

A. This goes back to 2001. When the planes hit the Twin Towers on 9/11, this fusion scenario took shape very quickly. Because the government understood immediately that these companies were grabbing all this data that they needed. All that predictive analytics, all that predictive data — that was going to be essential for the Patriot Act. It was going to be essential for everything that Washington was imagining as the war on terror. And Washington wasn’t alone because within a very short period of time all the world’s democracies were practicing warrantless and secret data collection. We saw that it was governmental needs that allowed Google to continue to practice its theft. And that has continued to this day.

Q. I’ve noticed that beyond regulation, you also talk about “reinvention...”

A. And abolition. Regulation is just a step along the way — a negotiation, a compromise, a limit, but it doesn’t say: you cannot exist. We can have surveillance capitalism, or we can have democracy, but we cannot have both. Because they are fundamentally at odds with one another. Regulation gets us into the discussion of what’s wrong, but ultimately, we are going to need to go upstream to where it all starts to do what we should have done at the beginning: call it theft, prohibit it, and invent a better alternative centered on humanity.

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