For almost every year since 2013, a defining feature forecast or declared in retrospect by at least one major publication—Economist, Guardian, oed, ft—has been the ‘techlash’. If we were to locate an origin-point for this discourse, it would probably be Edward Snowden’s 2013 revelations, but the tech giants really became a matter for establishment concern with the political upsets of 2016. That companies and states have at their disposal astonishing amounts of data about us is, it seems, not so troubling if they are securely under the control of people with whom one tacitly identifies. The Obama campaigns had pioneered data-intensive micro-targeting to their great advantage, but when the data scientists—sometimes the very same people—lent their skills to Trump and Vote Leave, Facebook appeared as a handmaid to the populist bogeyman. Legislation followed, with the eu’s 2016 General Data Protection Regulation (gdpr) and the 2018 California Consumer Privacy Act (ccpa). Organizations the world over had to tweak their newsletter sign-up processes, but the data overlords marched on.

One figure stands out in this discourse for the scale of her contribution and the acclaim she has received. Beginning in 2013 with a series of articles in the faz and culminating in the 2019 book The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power, Shoshana Zuboff described a new kind of capitalism bent on turning us into a behavioural psychologist’s lab rats. Strikingly for a book that sounded somewhat Marxish—thematizing not only capitalism but expropriation, economic surplus and towering asymmetries of power—Surveillance Capitalism won the approval of Obama, who had presided over a major expansion of mass surveillance under the nsa’s prism programme. Zuboff also joined arch surveillance capitalist Mark Zuckerberg, Web inventor Tim Berners-Lee and aspiring surveillance capitalist Jeff Bezos to become the fourth recipient of the Axel Springer Award. How to account for a critic so immediately canonized? The continuities in Zuboff’s oeuvre make it instructive to sketch her career as a whole.

Born in 1951, Zuboff’s story begins in the factory of her maternal grandfather, an entrepreneur and inventor who may have inspired a taste for business and technology. At Harvard she studied with leading behaviourist B. F. Skinner and began a doctoral thesis in social psychology titled ‘The Ego at Work’. But from her student years she had one foot in the management world, spending time in Venezuela as an ‘organizational change consultant’ to the state telecoms company, during which she studied workers making transitions from the rainforest. Soon after completing her PhD, she was examining the psychological and organizational implications of computer-mediated work, resulting in a tome widely regarded as a classic—In the Age of the Smart Machine: The Future of Work and Power (1988).

Centred on ethnographic studies of a handful of American companies that were introducing new computer-based technologies, Smart Machine gave a humanistic account of the struggles of workers and managers to adapt. As such, it may be read as a non-Marxist contribution to the labour-process debates of the time, which had unfolded since Harry Braverman’s 1974 book Labour and Monopoly Capital. But Zuboff’s emphasis was not simply on the implications of automation for workers, for the computerization of the work process didn’t merely replicate something done by the human body: it produced a new flow of information that formed an ‘electronic text’ which would become central to the new work process.

For Zuboff, the verb automate thus needed supplementing with a new coinage: informate. The bulk of Smart Machine was devoted to ‘information’ in this sense, looking at the ways workers grappled with the textualization of the workplace, how the premium on knowledge led to a new ‘division of learning’, and how managers attempted to shore up their authority. Zuboff’s analyses of online cultures developing around 1980s workplace bulletin boards were uncanny harbingers of what would come in the era of mass social media. And in the final third of the book she turned to the darker implications of the electronic text as it was used to aid surveillance over workers in the realization of ‘panoptic power’. If information was to be a tool of managerial ‘certainty and control’, Zuboff asked, would people be reduced to ‘serving a smart machine’? Invoking Arendt, she imagined the behaviourist’s ideal of a society controlled by surveillance and nudges becoming realized in the computerization of the workplace. Yet Zuboff’s analysis had indicated an alternative, grounded in a more horizontal embrace of the electronic text.

Smart Machine earned Zuboff tenure at Harvard, but she still had one foot outside academia, and was hired in 1987 as a consultant to Thorn emi by ceo Jim Maxmin, who would become her co-author and partner. In the 1990s she ran a summer school for mid-life executives at which they were encouraged to reflect on such things as how much ‘net worth’ was enough. From a New England lakeside home Zuboff and Maxmin managed an e-commerce investment fund while working on their 2002 book The Support Economy: Why Corporations Are Failing Individuals and the Next Episode of Capitalism, which delved into business history to develop a periodization of ‘enterprise logics’. But the central thread was a tale of the long emergence of the autonomous individual that would have made Hegel blush. The desires of this individual were always prior to whatever businesses were doing, waiting to be unleashed by the canny entrepreneur who could align themselves with the end consumer and found a new enterprise logic.

Josiah Wedgwood was the first of these Great Men, Henry Ford the second—though as lead consumers, women were the unsung heroes of capitalist history. Drawing on Alfred D. Chandler’s notion of managerial capitalism and Ulrich Beck’s concept of second modernity, Zuboff and Maxmin described how, in the world birthed by Ford, a growing psychological individuality came to crash upon the rocks of bureaucratized organizations and masculinist corporate cultures: this was the central, motivating contradiction of their theory. Businesses were concerned only with ‘transaction value’, viewing the end consumer merely as a means. Combative relationships with consumers were the symptoms of a ‘transaction crisis’. Thus, the time had come for a new seer to expose those latent desires. If businesses could only make a Copernican turn to the end consumer, they would find a world of pent-up ‘relationship value’. They would need to draw on new technologies, saving costs through merging digital infrastructures and orienting to the provision of ‘support’ configured to the individual. The projected economic ‘revolution’ seemed to involve the generalization of something like the executive’s personal assistant.