Shoshana Zuboff's 'Surveillance Capitalism' Analyzed Through Art

The article reviews Shoshana Zuboff's book 'The Age of Surveillance Capitalism' (LUISS University Press, 2019), examining its critique of digital data exploitation and its connections to contemporary art. Zuboff, a Harvard Business School professor, argues that tech giants like Google and Facebook extract human experience as raw material for behavioral prediction and modification. The pandemic has accelerated surveillance, with Singapore pioneering a COVID-19 tracking app. Artists resist this power: Leo Selvaggio creates resin masks to fool facial recognition; Adam Harvey's 'Think Privacy Selfie Mirror' at the New Museum exploits algorithm weaknesses, and his Stealth clothing line confuses drone surveillance; Benjamin Grosser develops 'demetricators' and the Go Rando extension to obscure behavioral surplus. Zuboff calls for confronting this expropriation of human experience.