Shoshana Zuboff’s The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power is the book which has had the single biggest impact on how I see the world in the last couple of years.

I genuinely think I will look back at having read it and see it as a turning point. It’s already started to influence decisions I’m making about my future.

This isn’t the kind of book I would normally pick up. Typically if I’m reading non-fiction it’s biographical of some kind or a literary essay. I’m not a historian or an economist, I didn’t study politics or philosophy. But when someone I was conducting research with at work brought up this book as an argument against the work I was doing (which having now read it, was completely unjustified) I knew I had to read it. Now, I’m so grateful for having met that angry man.

So what is surveillance capitalism?

Zuboff defines it as the below:

Sur-veil-lance Cap-i-tal-ism, n.

1. A new economic order that claims human experience as free raw material for hidden commercial practices of extraction, prediction, and sales; 2. A parasitic economic logic in which the production of goods and services is subordinated to a new global architecture of behavioral modification; 3. A rogue mutation of capitalism marked by concentrations of wealth, knowledge, and power unprecedented in human history; 4. The foundational framework of a surveillance economy; 5. As significant a threat to human nature in the twenty-first century as industrial capitalism was to the natural world in the nineteenth and twentieth; 6. The origin of a new instrumentarian power that asserts dominance over society and presents startling challenges to market democracy; 7. A movement that aims to impose a new collective order based on total certainty; 8. An expropriation of critical human rights that is best understood as a coup from above: an overthrow of the people’s sovereignty.

I know that’s a dense read. It’s a dense topic that reaches in every corner of our lives. But to oversimplify what’s at the heart of Zuboff’s epic, for the sake of brevity in this book club review my summary is below.

Corporations are actively and consciously collecting more and more of our data unregulated. This data is not just being used to create better services for us. Instead it is being collected on such a scale that it is being used to map human behaviour at an unprecedented scale. Once mapped our behaviour is turned into predictive products, which are then sold onto other companies. Our data is not the product but it is what powers the product. These products once sold are were used in the first instance for marketing, but are increasingly being used to control our actions in highly targeted ways. The impacts of corporations having control of our futures are as yet understudied and raise real questions of what free will may look like in the future.

This month’s alternative book cover design for The Age of Surveillance Capitalism

The Age of Surveillance Capitalism sets the scene by covering some of the human basics that have made it possible surveillance capitalism to grow under the radar. Then Zuboff sets out some of the hopes we had for tech’s capabilities when enhanced with the collection of vast tranches of data, through the example of the smart home. But then we hear about commercial interests and human decisions (not natural growth) have led us to a very different place. Zuboff mainly focuses on Google and Facebook as her examples; they’re the biggest surveillance capitalist firms in action today. The conditions they and cultures they have created are unprecedented, so how do we push back? That’s where Zuboff leaves us. She doesn’t provide an antidote to surveillance capitalism, largely because I don’t think there is one solution, she opens our eyes and then closes with a rallying cry.

While The Age of Surveillance Capitalism ends passionately, Zuboff is clear and appears relatively biased throughout. This is not a conspiracy theory. It is a little alarmist in places. But this is a Harvard Professor who has spent years investigating how the proliferation of technology and data have changed our economies and lives explaining her findings. She does dive into some more theoretical frameworks, there were moments I had to stop to google economists, but she explains everything she lays out and is never verbose of scholarly for the sake of it.

There are subtle elements of Zuboffs prose that work to constantly keep you engaged no matter how dense the material she’s covering, and I’m no economics scholar. One that stays firmly at the front of mind is that she always uses “she” in any hypothetical examples. This is a small change, but when we live in a world where male is the default it turned on a little light in my brain every time she did it. It also made me feel far more included in the story and what the future may hold than if she had used “he”.

This book was a real wake up call for me.

I had always had questions about how the big companies were making money and using my data, but I’d never pieced anything on this scale together. This is going to be one of the biggest fights for my generation, and those after us, if we want to claw back control over our own lives and for our rights to uncertainty.

As you may be able to tell from my enthusiasm , I think this is a topic everyone should read about and start to be aware of in their interactions online. If nothing else to recognise that the place we’re in right now, hasn’t just organically come about. It’s been driven by choices made by companies we’re giving more control to without understanding.

But I also recognise that not everyone is prepared to take on a 708 page book which covers some pretty heavy material, although it’s well written enough that you can certainly get through it at pace and in my opinion the details make all 708 pages worth a read. For those of you who just want to learn more, and perhaps aren’t ready for the full read instead of just sharing reviews in my articles section, this month I’ve included some pieces/podcasts on surveillance capitalism as well.

Enjoy, be mildly terrified, get angry, then let’s get going on taking back our rights to the future!

 

SOME QUESTIONS TO PONDER AS YOU READ…

  • Before reading, what scared you? Did it change after reading?
  • Should we push back against surveillance capitalism?
  • What can we do to push back against surveillance capitalism as individuals and as a society?
  • Are there any examples where you’ve seen surveillance capitalism at work without noticing it before?
  • What’s the best thing that’s happened to you in a moment of uncertainty, a moment where you had to take a leap of faith or put trust in something you couldn’t control?

IF YOU WANT SOME FURTHER READING TRY…

  • Public Affairs books has a great introduction to the book including section summaries and further reading links
  • If you’re more into podcasts, The Verge did a brilliant interview with Zuboff which focused on a discussion of the meatiest bits of the book
  • For those of you who like a video format The Intercept hosted an evening with Zuboff and senior correspondent Naomi Klein
  • Zuboff offers a short written discussion of The Age of Surveillance Capitalism in a feature with NY Mag’s Intelligencer

IF YOU WANT MORE BOOKS LIKE THIS HAVE A LOOK AT…

I’m sorry I don’t have any similar book recommendations for this one just yet, as I said it was the first time I’d delved into this kind of non-fiction. If you have any tips, please do leave me a comment below and I’ll update as we go!

The Immortalists by Chloe Benjamin is the first book I’ve ever read from start to finish on my phone. In a bid to find a reading groove that works for me I’ve been trying out new reading media. By about half way through this one, I was actively looking for any chance I could to pick up my phone, not to scroll blindly through Twitter, but to read. Anything that gets me looking forward to my tube ride is pretty darn powerful, let me tell you.

The Immortalists follows the story of the four Gold children who, in New York’s Lower East Side in 1969, venture out to see a fortune teller to hear the day they will die. It toes the line between page turner and thought provoking depth brilliantly. Essentially Chloe Benjamin asks her readers “If you knew the date of your death, how would you live your life?” Then she gives them a story which is “dazzling family love story and a sweeping novel of remarkable ambition and depth” that “probes the line between destiny and choice, reality and illusion, this world and the next” to make the question a little more real and a little more visceral to ponder.

Benjamin has a way of making what could be ordinary lives feel extraordinary and completely compelling. It’s a book that can make you want to get on the Victoria line in rush hour. This is particularly impressive because you know exactly how the story and in fact each section of the novel will end as they each include the death year of the sibling whose story are about to follow.

I won’t give anything more than what the blurb offers about each of the Gold’s stories so you can enjoy them in full.

Golden boy Simon escapes to the West Coast, searching for love in ’80s San Francisco; dreamy Klara becomes a Las Vegas magician obsessed with blurring reality and fantasy; eldest son Daniel struggles to maintain security as an army doctor post-9/11; and bookish Varya throws herself into longevity research, where she tests the boundary between science and immortality.

I wanted to riff a little on the idea of tarot and predictions as well as mortality in this alternative cover design.

Klara’s story was the one that engaged me most in spite, or perhaps because, of the fact that we’re completely different. I could never imagine myself clinging to a bit of metal with my teeth and falling from a great height with only the strength of my jaws to protect me in the name of magic. But I think hers is the reaction to impending death that would most closely mirror my own. That said, I could understand and empathise with each of the Golds despite them all approaching the same subject in such contrary ways

These wider themes of death and family ties are woven throughout the stories as you start to see the impacts of the prophecy on each sibling’s choices. But they really come to a head in a more overt way in the final section of the novel, where Benjamin stops having her characters ask about death but about life with Varya and her turn to scientific research. That contrast, to being with life at the end of a story, especially when you know exactly how it will end, is what really elevated The Immortalists for me.

This is one I’d recommend to anyone who loves a good story. That’s how much I enjoyed it. Each of the Gold’s stories is more compelling than the next and as I closed the final pages I found myself considering what death means to me in a slightly different way.

 

SOME QUESTIONS TO PONDER AS YOU READ…

  • The four Gold children have very different reactions to finding out when they’ll die, what would you change in your life if you’d visited the fortune teller?
  • Which character, and section of the story, did you engage with the most? Do they align with your own ideas about death?
  • How are the themes of family and death interwoven?
  • The Immortalists begins in 1969, if the Gold’s had been children today how would their lives have been different?
  • With fortune tellers and magicians as major characters, The Immortalists, seems to have at least one hand in a world of more spiritual prediction. What difference would be made if the prediction had come from the fortune teller of today, AI?

IF YOU WANT SOME FURTHER READING TRY…

  • This short review from The Observer claims The Immortalists remains a boundlessly moving inquisition into mortality, grief and passion.
  • For Vox, Constance Grady focuses in on the siblings at the heart of the novel.
  • Fellow author, Jean Zimmerman, says “The reader will likely be thoroughly taken by the world of the Gold siblings, in all its shades of brilliant color. It’s not a totally comfortable realm, since we know all too well how this tale’s going to end, but getting there is lovely” in a review for NPR.
  • Read Chloe Benjamin’s own thoughts on the novel and her writing process in this original essay for Powell’s.

IF YOU WANT MORE BOOKS LIKE THIS HAVE A LOOK AT…

  • Chloe Benjamin’s The Anatomy of Dreams
  • Meg Wolitzer’s The Female Persuasion
  • Sally Rooney’s Conversations with Friends
  • Elena Varvello’s Can You Hear Me?

Before I kick off the first book club post of 2019 I want to take a moment to appreciate the wonders of reading. I’ve read almost half as many books in the first two months of this year as I did all of last year. That’s in part because I’ve been experimenting with how and when I read, but it’s also in part because I’ve realised I really want to embrace the power, and the joy, of reading again. I loved it as a child. I loved it as a student. Then I went to uni and didn’t like it quite so much. Then I seemed to lose my ability to concentrate for more than 2 minutes without scrolling. Then I got busier and busier. But that doesn’t mean I can’t get back to that childlike wonder again. In fact, I’m hoping I might be headed somewhere even better with a much bigger vocabulary and critical toolkit than I ever had aged 12.

But that’s enough of me waxing lyrical about the power of book in general. Let’s talk about one book in particular, the book that’s the focus of this month’s book club Heather Havrilesky’s What if this were enough?. Havrilesky is best known as the writer behind The Cut’s Ask Polly column which offers sage, and sometimes sharp, wisdom to the lost and confused. She turned that column into a previous, critically acclaimed collection of essays. In this new collection of 19 loosely connected essays, Havrilesky picks apart the forces in the world that make us doubt that this, and ultimately we, are enough.

I was drawn to this collection by its title and, ironically, its appearance on the social media profiles of a number of readers whose tastes I trust. Clearly my subconscious was convinced that through reading Havrilesky’s essays, this might be enough. Just one more thing, one more read, and I would be there.

I’m just going to comment on two essays in this review, the two I remember most keenly almost a month after reading the collection, to give you a feel for its content, ‘the happiest place on earth’ and ‘lost treasure’.

In ‘the happiest place on earth’ Havrilesky recalls a trip to Disneyland. She comments on the level of performance and how that performance is viewed once or twice removed through videos on phones. She dissects how Disneyland placates its visitors. She also reconfirms my strong desire never to go to Disney (sorry mouse fans).

‘Lost treasure’ is a classic “another man’s trash” story with a twist. As a child, Havrilesky visited a neighbour who collected what a young Havrilesky viewed as trash, the older woman turned into treasured sculptures. The moral to this one wasn’t just value is in the eye of the beholder, but that we might find more value in the world around us if we ever slowed down and focused enough to pick up trash to turn into art.

For this alternative cover, I wanted something that at once suggested completeness (the circular text) and not the half coloured background. I also wanted to play with the idea of being unsure if something is half full/empty

Havrilesky is clearly an incredibly skilled cultural commentator and writer. She has moments of unchecked privilege and questionable views, like the her decision to deride her friends who checked her book out of the library rather than reading it, but in my opinion she shouldn’t be written off for those flaws. We’ve all got flaws. We all need to learn to be more accepting of others, and ourselves, to accept that we’re all enough if we’re growing.

But I closed What if this were enough? feeling like it wasn’t quite enough. I wanted it to say more. The loose connection between essays left me feeling cold, I needed a conclusion, a pay off. Perhaps that’s the point. Perhaps my unquenchable desire for a “and this is what it all means” is part of the problem. I need an external force to tell me what to do next to accept I’m enough. But perhaps it’s a lack in the collection, and a number of similar essay collections, which are written as almost completely separate essays. Each essay has its own strengths and weaknesses and the collection is just a sum of these, but not more. It’s a set of columns, a stream of twitter threads, a collection not a book as a whole with a clear thread of narrative or argument.

If you’re searching for answers, this book isn’t for you. If you’re looking for a rousing conclusion to let you know you are enough, this book isn’t for you. If you want to know what a world may look like if we decided it was enough, this book isn’t for you. But if you’re looking for erudite commentary on some of the mundane and mind boggling ways we’ve convinced ourselves that this isn’t enough, I think you’ll like this one. It’ll get you thinking, it’ll get you questioning, it may even, if you’re smarter than me, lead you to finding your own conclusions.

 

SOME QUESTIONS TO PONDER AS YOU READ…

  • Are there any essays that stand out to you on a personal level?
  • What conclusions are you able to draw from the essays as a collection? How does being placed next to one another change the meaning of the essays?
  • Did the collection change anything about how you view your own life?
  • If you were to include your own personal anecdote about being enough, or not, what would you include?

IF YOU WANT SOME FURTHER READING TRY…

  • In this review for The Bustle, Sadie Trombetta reflects on how Havrilesky’s essays made her think about what it means to ‘disconnect’
  • This Kirkus review concludes the collection is fun, often insightful read for digital fatalists.
  • Erin Keen concludes the veteran critic and beloved advice columnist’s new collection of essays is a lifeline built of the toughest love

IF YOU WANT MORE BOOKS LIKE THIS HAVE A LOOK AT…

I think the one thing that has stuck with me about Meg Wolitzer’s The Female Persuasion is the idea there is a “flame we all believe is flickering inside of us, waiting to be seen and fanned by the right person at the right time.”

 

When I first picked up The Female Persuasion I was expecting something much more about the dynamics of contemporary feminism, something deeply and overtly political. Don’t get me wrong it was definitely about what it means to be a feminist now, but it was so much more about that desire to be seen. That desire is universal but it’s been magnified tenfold for those growing up in today’s society where we’ve been conditioned to believe we can all be stars and that our relationships will be like the movies.

For this month’s alternative cover I wanted to do something simple and bold. I wanted it to say that this is a books which isn’t afraid to take up space, to say something.

The Female Persuasion follows four characters primarily – Greer Kadetsky (our protagonist), Faith Frank (who has been in “women’s movement for decades, a figure who inspires others to influence the world”), Cory Pinto (Greer’s boyfriend), and Zee Einstat (Greer’s college bestfriend). They’re all growing up in their own ways and they’re all experiencing those big moments where one person has an irrevocable impact, positive or negative, on your life.

 

Despite being much longer than most of the books I normally pick up – I find I rarely have the concentration or patience for anything over around 300 pages anymore which is so sad. I thoroughly enjoyed The Female Persuasion, and for a read I found myself desperate to pick up so I could live in the world of its characters it left me with a lot more big questions than I expected as I read.

 

I would highly recommend this one to pretty much anyone. It’s definitely not “women’s book” whatever that may be, but I know that there might be the perception that it would only speak to those of the female persuasion. It raises big societal and personal questions, that I think we all face at some point, in a way that’s supremely human.

 

SOME QUESTIONS TO PONDER AS YOU READ

  • How do you think the different stories play off and support one another?
  • One of the central themes of the novel is mentorship and the power dynamics it involves, have you ever had a mentor?
  • As with every bildungsroman, The Female Persuasion asks a lot of questions around how where we come from can change how we grow up and who we become. How do you think the different characters backgrounds shape the lives they lead?
  • The Female Persuasion features the end of a number of relationships. Is this an inevitable part of the story? Is it an inevitable part of life?

 

IF YOU WANT SOME FURTHER READING TRY…

 

IF YOU WANT MORE BOOKS LIKE THIS HAVE A LOOK AT…

I’ve recently got into a bit of a rut with my reading, after picking up a few longer reads I struggled to get into. So, when I had Sayaka Murata’s Convenience Store Woman, a short bright yellow oddball novel, recommended to me at least 3 times by The New York Times I had high hopes that it would be the remedy. I raced through it’s 163 pages in two hungry sittings so you could say it did the trick.

 

Translated from Japanese by Ginny Tapley Takemori, Convenience Store Woman is Sayaka Murata’s debut English-language novel. Despite being one of the most exciting voices in fiction at the minute, Murata still works part time in a convenience store, which was where she found her inspiration for her latest novel.

 

The story follows a self-defined peculiar woman named Keiko as she struggles to learn how to fit in. The core of her attempts to conform is a convenience store, the Hiiromachi Station Smile Mart, where she’s worked for 18 years. She develops a deep, and almost romantic, relationship with the store which has given her life structure. But pressures from her friends and family push her to reconsider that relationship.

This is my alternative cover design for Convenience Store Woman, it’s a new more illustrated take on that bright yellow background.

Convenience Store Woman is certainly not a thriller but it’s surprisingly difficult to put down. Every small twist has you wanting to know more and Murata/Takemori’s prose has a real rhythm to it. It’s also absurdly deadpan funny. While the narrative bobs and weaves, Keiko’s narration stay ramrod straight and stuck to her tone. So you’re left with a story that’s at once unflinchingly unemotional and self-aware, and has the off-beat charm of an Amelie or Shopgirl.

 

Instead of my normal “I’d recommend this book if…” conclusion, I’ll just leave you with this review so you can decide for yourself:

 

A slim, spare and difficult-to-define little book, both very funny and achingly sad in turns, told from the point of view of a woman who’s trying to find her place in the world . . . This empathetic novel is also a touching exploration of loneliness and alienation, feelings and conditions that, for better or for worse, can be recognized by people worldwide.”—Book Reporter

 

SOME QUESTIONS TO PONDER AS YOU READ

  • Keiko picks up characteristics from those around her very directly. Have you ever picked up behaviours from those around you? Did you know you were doing it?
  • If Keiko doesn’t see herself as having a stable personality, does she have a stable narrating voice?
  • There’s a lot discussion in the novel about societal structures and expectations, to what extent do you feel these are real or perceived by the characters?
  • Convenience Store Woman might takes the idea of being defined by your work to an extreme, have you ever felt defined by your job? How?

 

IF YOU WANT SOME FURTHER READING TRY…

 

IF YOU WANT MORE BOOKS LIKE THIS HAVE A LOOK AT…