In ‘The Age of Surveillance Capitalism’1, Shoshana Zuboff describes big tech extracting behavioural data from users, and transforming it into predictions for financial gain.
Zuboff drapes her diagnosis in dramatic Marxist rhetoric of ‘violated autonomy’ and ‘human dignity‘ —
‘Now it is human nature that is scraped, torn, and taken for another century’s market project’.
Diving through Zuboff’s books, I genuinely didn’t expect to find what I did. While I did (partially) read ‘The Age of Surveillance Capitalism’ a few years back, I had not yet come to understand the rampant institutional inversionism practised at large. And it was from this erroneous understanding that I drew in her works in past essays.
To say Zuboff aligns strongly with my research is no overstatement. She acts as an agitator, dedicating vast stretches of text to emotional framing. The goal is to provoke a reaction that bypasses critical questioning — a tactic Marx used to great effect
She’s ultimately an Eduard Bernstein influenced ‘Third Way’ socialist, who believes the private sector requires a permanent oversight panel.
Yes, a clearinghouse.
Bernstein was a revisionist Marxist, whose fellow comrades mockingly described as ‘a German Fabian’2. His pivotal 1899 book, ‘Evolutionary Socialism’3 recommends the cooperative structure which the Fabians Arthur Penty4, GDH Cole5, and Leonard S Woolf6 developed into early functionalism7, a model fused into the League of Nations by Alfred Zimmern.
The United Nations was founded on this model, with the ECOSOC being its administrative organ, explaining why NGOs are registered with them.
The model might be more recogniseable under the ‘Third Way’ label, promoted by Tony Blair8 and Bill Clinton in the late 90s. Or you might alternatively know it as Lenin’s New Economic Policy9, IFDA’s Third System10, or even Wolfgang Reinicke’s Trisectoral Networks11. It’s the same mechanism, wrapped in different rhetoric.
The only question is who ends up in governance.
The model describes a public-private partnership for the common good.
Mention of these often land you groans and complaints about usurious capitalist enterprise. I will certainly not disagree that the private partners capitalise on these arrangements, but what matters is actually the silent third party who defines the ‘common good’.
In contemporary United Nations arrangements, that would typically be the ECOSOC-registered General Consultative Status12 Non-Government Organisation. Lenin, however, swapped the NGO for the Communist Party, but should the NGO be captured by financial interests, then it suddenly becomes a matter of definition.
But let’s return to Zuboff. Her rhetoric is frequently stirring: ‘If democracy is to be replenished in the coming decades’, she writes, ‘it is up to us to rekindle the sense of outrage and loss over what is being taken from us’. Setting aside the blatant inversion on display (society is claimed to have drifted; a reversal is required more favourable to her agenda), she frequently frames stakes in existential terms: ‘What is at stake here is the human expectation of sovereignty over one’s own life and authorship of one’s own experience’.
She poses questions that cut to the heart of power: ‘Who knows? Who decides? Who decides who decides?’ These are, of course, valid questions.
But the trouble with her solutions is where they lead, quietly whispered as they are.
The Fragment on Machines, Translated
In the ‘Fragment on Machines’13, Marx described how knowledge and skill become absorbed into capital and embedded in the machine system itself. Workers are reduced to ‘mere living accessories’, relating to production through supervision and regulation of processes that run themselves. The accumulated knowledge of society — Marx’s ‘general intellect’ — is integrated with fixed capital such as machines, and the system becomes capable of describing and monitoring itself.
In The Age of the Smart Machine (1988)14, Zuboff translates this same observation into Harvard Business School prose. She introduces ‘informating’ — a process by which information technology ‘translates activities, objects, and events into information... renders events, objects, and processes visible, knowable, and shareable in a new way’. The result is ‘a continuously accruing electronic text’ that ‘installs itself at the center stage of work and organizational life’.
The parallel is… impeccable. Where Marx described knowledge concentrated in machinery, Zuboff’s interview subjects report that ‘the technologists have concentrated intelligence in the machine. The user pushes the button, and it’s done for them. You don’t have to know bookkeeping or understand the general ledger’. Where Marx saw workers reduced to watchers, Zuboff observe that ‘people stop using their skills, and pretty soon they don’t know the business very well... most of its technical knowledge is embodied in software’.
She even opens her chapter on ‘The Abstraction of Industrial Work’ with a quote from Folkert Wilken’s The Liberation of Capital that could have come directly from Marx: ‘The irresistible pull toward technological development... is caused, we should remember, by the unconscious and deep-rooted desire to free ourselves from the material oppression of the material world’.
Technology liberating humanity from toil, knowledge objectified in systems, direct labour increasingly unnecessary — the similarities with Marx are uncanny. But the paths diverge, because while Marx believed that these conditions might create conditions for overthrowing capitalism, Zuboff identifies the same as a governance question. In her account, the ‘liveliest debate’ concerned whether the new technology would ‘exacerbate this trend or reverse’ the deskilling spiral. Marx’s outcome is assumed from the start, only its management remained open to contest.
The same structure applies to cybernetics and systems theory. Norbert Wiener’s feedback loops, self-monitoring systems, and governance through information flows all map onto the Fragment’s self-describing apparatus. But where these traditions describe the system, Zuboff instead asks who should govern it.
Continuity Across Three Decades
This conceptual architecture — the Fragment translated into management theory, the apparatus assumed, governance as the only variable — runs through all of Zuboff’s major works.
In 1988, she framed the choice as ‘automate’ (dehumanising) versus ‘informate’ (empowering). Both options require the same underlying infrastructure: total visibility, the electronic text, everything rendered legible. The question throughout is how to manage the panopticon, never whether to build it.
By 2002, in The Support Economy15, the political programme became explicit. Under the heading ‘THE THIRD FORCE’, Zuboff proposes ‘distributed capitalism’ as the synthesis that could ‘marry the new markets for deep support with the new digital medium and ignite a new era of wealth creation’. This ‘new society of individuals’ would achieve ‘psychological self-determination’ through ‘federated support networks’ and ‘relationships of advocacy and trust’.
The book is of note, because it incessantly dances around the term ‘egoism’ without ever quite getting there, instead opting for terms such as ‘narcissism’ or ‘a new and broader sense of self-interest’. This would have been a clincher, as it’s expressly where Michael Laitman and Moses Hess come from.
The constituencies she identifies for this transformation include ‘consumers and employees, managers and executives, entrepreneurs, technologists, investors, and public officials’. In other words, this is stakeholder capitalism, articulated fifteen years before the ‘Great Reset’ was branded as such.
In the same text, Zuboff explicitly disclaimed responsibility for implementation: ‘Many of the specific manifestations of distributed capitalism’s operating practices that we have imagined here may never come to life. Its principles, though, can be a beacon’. This admission reveals the function of the work: it provides a legitimating framework, and whoever builds whatever they build can point to the beacon as justification.
But — much like Marx — she’s included her get-out clause, so don’t hold her accountable for the outcomes.
The Proposed Solution
Zuboff’s prescriptions centre on new laws, democratic institutions, and rights declarations designed to ‘contradict’ the ‘extractive operations of surveillance capitalism’. She celebrates the Spanish Data Protection Agency and European Court of Justice ‘right to be forgotten’ ruling as models, noting that ‘the court declared that decisive authority over the digital future rests with the people, their laws, and their democratic institutions’.
The practical effect of these proposals would be a governance structure mediating between the private data economy and the public interest — a clearinghouse. Such a body would establish transparency requirements for algorithmic systems, license certain data practices while prohibiting others, and provide democratic legitimation for the continued operation of data infrastructure. The surveillance apparatus stays intact but becomes answerable to steering mechanisms authorised by public institutions controlled by a clearinghouse.
Zuboff frames this as a ‘third modernity’ that ‘transcends the collision’ between technological extraction and human dignity. She invokes ‘this century’s equivalent of the social movements of the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries that aimed to tether raw capitalism to society’.
Her models are the Progressive Era, the New Deal, and the Great Society — all of which are institutional frameworks that governed capitalism without abolishing it.
The Inversions
Zuboff’s rhetorical method involves systematic inversion, and at times projection of her own method onto her targets.
She invokes Adam Smith on ‘impertinent obstructions’, claiming Smith opposed ‘a government whose monetary and trade policies allowed merchants to enrich themselves at the expense of their consumers’. But Smith’s actual argument identified government policy itself as the obstruction — mercantilism, monopoly grants, trade restrictions. His solution was removal of interference16. Zuboff transforms Smith from a critic of centralised coordination into an advocate for improved coordination.
Similarly, she positions herself in Marx’s lineage, noting that ‘Marx grasped the world with his thickly articulated theory, but with only the power of his ideas, he could not implement his vision. Long after the publication of Marx’s theories, men such as Lenin, Stalin, and Mao applied them to real life’. She describes Lenin, via the Manuels, as ‘a specialist in applied utopistics’.
But what Lenin, Stalin, and Mao actually implemented was accounting and control on a civilisational scale. Lenin’s famous slogan was ‘soviet power plus electrification’, but his operational definition of socialism was ‘accounting and control’ extended to the entire economy17 — internal passports, work books, party files, state banking monopoly, and the elimination of private transaction.
By invoking this lineage, Zuboff positions her own theory as awaiting its implementer — and those implementers are already quietly at work, citing her approvingly.
Perhaps most revealing is her accusation that surveillance capitalists ‘reverse the normal sequence of theory and practice. Their practices move ahead at high velocity in the absence of an explicit and contestable theory... The absence of a clear articulation of their theory leaves the rest of us to ponder its practical effects’.
This describes precisely what her own work does. She provides thickly articulated theory while disclaiming responsibility for implementation, leaving ‘the rest of us to ponder’ what those who possess actual institutional power will build with her legitimating vocabulary.
She offers the beacon, asks others construct the city — and then accuses her ideological opponents of her own hypocrisy.
The Structural Omission
Notably, in 700 pages about surveillance and power, Zuboff never mentions the FATF, the Bank for International Settlements, the Financial Stability Board, the Basel Committee on Banking Supervision, the Egmont Group of financial intelligence units, or the Wolfsberg Group of global banks.
She names Google’s chief economist, but not the central bankers’ central bank. She tracks congressional data privacy bills but not the intergovernmental coordination that determines whether you can open a bank account or send money abroad.
By defining surveillance capitalism as a commercial phenomenon — tech platforms selling predictions to advertisers — she constructs an analytic frame that excludes the financial infrastructure layer. Her clearinghouse model can therefore be absorbed by that layer without contradiction.
The absorption is already underway. ECB executive board member Fabio Panetta stated in 2021 that ‘the digital euro could act as an antidote against what American sociologist Shoshana Zuboff calls ‘surveillance capitalism’’18.
Her critique of commercial surveillance is being deployed to legitimise governmental surveillance infrastructure. Critics of central bank digital currencies get dismissed by invoking her documentation of private-sector surveillance as the ‘real’ problem — as if programmable money that can be turned off, expired, geofenced, or conditioned on behaviour were not surveillance at all.
Zuboff does not address central bank digital currencies, and her framework cannot do so because it defines surveillance as a private-sector pathology for which state oversight is the cure. Over 130 countries are now exploring or piloting CBDCs. China’s digital yuan already implements transaction tracking and programmable constraints. The ECB is advancing toward a digital euro.
The financial layer she never names is building exactly the infrastructure her solutions would legitimate.
Historical Antecedents
The clearinghouse model has deep roots in financial architecture. The London Bank Clearinghouse emerged in the nineteenth century as a mechanism for netting obligations between private banks, a model which placed the Bank of England at the apex of the structure.
The Political and Economic Planning (PEP) treated this architecture as already perfected and proposed to restructure the broader economy around it, while leaving the Bank of England fully intact. The clearinghouse is the template for managing concentrated power, never for escaping it.
Zuboff applies this logic to the information economy. She never invokes the clearinghouse by name, but the architecture her suggestions require follow the same pattern.
Critical Implications
The digital economy operates in layers: the commercial layer of platforms selling predictions, the financial layer of banks and payment systems determining transaction access, and the infrastructural layer of protocols and rails. Zuboff’s critique operates entirely in the top layer.
By defining the problem as ungoverned surveillance capitalism, the solution space is pre-constrained. Abolition of the surveillance infrastructure, decentralisation, data sovereignty, and any exit to analog alternatives such as cash becomes unavailable.
Only negotiated governance of existing systems remains on the table. And because her framework never reaches the financial layer — where FATF sets the rules, where CBDCs are being built, where conditional payment infrastructure operate — her proposed clearinghouse would slot into that existing ecosystem rather than challenge it.
Judged through the lens of POSIWID (the Purpose Of a System Is What It Does), Zuboff’s work directs attention toward the commercial layer and away from the financial infrastructure layer, thus providing a villain, while framing the problem as ‘ungoverned’, thus supplying a vocabulary that legitimates integration with the very apparatus it critiques. It produces no friction whatsoever for central bank digital currencies, programmable money, or conditional access to the financial system.
‘Who decides who decides?’ she asks.
Her efforts to gate in the question ensures the answer is pre-determined.
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Thank you for reading and digesting this for us.
Thank You very much, Sir. This is clear, polite, thoughtful, and in a human voice, perhaps touched up lightly by AI.
The complaints by "Karen" after the previous "Surveillance Capitalism" post appear to be well answered to me, though your human identity remains protected from "doxxing".
Your human-nature shines through in this fine piece of analysis.