Workshop 2
Samahir Elzaki
Date: 28|11|2023
Page 1 (2)
Business Analytics and Organizational
Change, HT23
28
Zuboff introduced surveillance capitalism as a new form of information capitalism
that aims at predicting and modifying human behavior to generate revenue or market
control, then argued that it is not a mere consequence of technological progress but a thought
and intentional outcome, that fundamentally challenges the values and norms of the centuryold established market form and production capitalism. Another aspect is that those
surveillance capitalists’ firms, referring to Google Inc., are formally distant from, and
indifferent about, the population if those firms can capture what the population does and
says and then convert it into data.
The author continues, while using Google Inc. as the focal organization, as she
coined the term Big Other as a distributed and uncontested system built on the recording,
commodification and control of data of everyday experience and works through the four
main uses of computer-mediated transactions which are:

Data extraction and analysis: as data have actively been gathered often without
users consent or awareness, and boldly by sometimes bypassing privacy concerns,
then analyzed and the categorized and sold for interested parties.

New contractual forms due to better monitoring: this, as Zuboff asserted is
opposed to the reciprocities and mutual trust inherited in the industrial capitalism,
where public and private cameras, smart devices tracking, and facial recognition
capabilities of surveillance capitalists allow for continuous monitoring and therefore
new terms imposed on individuals.

Personalization and customization: the propensity of data been collected from
users in a clandestine manner, and sometimes even when they are offline, paves the
way for more targeted and customized services which come at the cost of users
waiving their rights to privacy.

Continuous experiments: which requires a shift from virtual retral analysis to
actual real-time analysis.
Zuboff also made some insightful comparisons between the surveillance capitalism,
represented by Google Inc., and the market form capitalism of the past century, represented
by General Motors, in that similarities existed in the concentration of power in the hand of
Department of Informatics
SE-901 87 Umeå
www.umu.se/english
Workshop 2
Samahir Elzaki
Date: 28|11|2023
Page 2 (2)
Business Analytics and Organizational
Change, HT23
28
the hyperscale companies that have greater access to personal data about individuals for the
former and the concentration of power in the hand of those who owned the means of
production for the later, nonetheless, she argued that surveillance capitalism, through the
mechanisms of the Big Other poses a threat to the democracy as in the essence, the covert
data capture is often seen as an erosion of privacy rights and redistribution of those rights
unilaterally for the benefit of the surveillance capitalists firms for profit and the fact remains
that Google Inc. has not been meaningfully subjected to any public oversight or
accountability for its mode of operation is of invading undefended personal and social
territories until some form of resistance is encountered, or what they refer to at Google Inc,
‘The Street View’.
Finally, I believe that the takeaway of this article is the impassioned warning of
Zuboff that we may either have a democracy or we have surveillance as they essentially
cannot co-exist.
References:

Big other: Surveillance Capitalism and the Prospects of an Information Civilization, by
Shoshana Zuboff 2015.
Department of Informatics
SE-901 87 Umeå
www.umu.se/english