The Age of Surveillance Capitalism. The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power by Shoshana Zuboff (review)

John Horgan who has written a foreword here) to protest loudly the ‘profound social, economic, political and technological’ implications of developments touched upon in the volume – the sum is not greater than the parts. Other parts here include Elaine Callinan’s consideration of responses in the regional press to Redmond’s call to war in 1914 and Ray Burke’s reflections on the changing relationship between that press and ‘the national broadcaster’ RTE, as well as Donal Ó Drisceoil’s look at ‘censorship, suppression and the Irish regional press, 1916–23’. In a final essay Anthony Cawley refers to corporate developments that have seen once proudly independent county papers succumb to takeovers by groups such as Independent News and Media, Thomas Crosbie Holdings, Celtic Media Group and Johnston Press. It is also a final reminder that the editors have perhaps tried too hard to fit a quart into a pint pot. They have, nonetheless, succeeded in underlining the central place of Irish regional papers in many people’s media world for much of the twentieth century. This book is a welcome addition to the growing volume of research on developments in the print media that were until quite recently neglected but that, thanks to scholars such as the contributors to this volume and groups such as the Newspaper and Periodical History Forum of Ireland, now receive greater attention than they did before. Professor Colum Kenny’s latest book, The Enigma of Arthur Griffith: ‘Father of Us All’ (Merrion Press) has just been published. The Age of Surveillance Capitalism. The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power, Shoshana Zuboff (London: Profile Books, 2018), 704 pages. In the first decade of the twenty-first century the high priests of Silicon Valley gloried in their ability to ‘move fast and break things’, riding roughshod over individual privacy, government regulations and paying as little tax as they possibly could, often through dubious methods. Now that the inevitable ‘techlash’ is gathering momentum, the high priests are huddled in Esalen – where else? – at private cuddle parties – why not? – and, according to a recent New Yorker article, they have settled on a new mantra: ‘move purposefully and fix things’. Hmm. Studies • volume 109 • number 433 104 Spring 2020: Book Reviews Studies_layout_SPRING-2020.indd 104 Studies_layout_SPRING-2020.indd 104 27/02/2020 13:59 27/02/2020 13:59 The reason why the tech companies, mainly the two most powerful, Google and Facebook, are coming under pressure is that people are beginning to realise the extent to which privacy is being abused and governments are beginning to emerge from their torpor and exert the rule of law on the online world, the world’s largest ungoverned space. They may also be beginning to feel the heat from Shoshana Zuboff’s ground-breaking, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, published earlier this year. Zuboff, a Harvard Business School professor, is a social psychologist and philosopher who has been studying the mechanics and effects of the digital platforms for many years. She has produced a devastating critique of a digital revolution which tracks and records our every move and sells the resulting data to advertisers. In the beginning advertisers created ads, then bought space from media owners and placed ads in that space – the press, TV, radio stations and billboards. Now advertisers buy data from the digital platforms, which not only provide the space for advertising messages but tell the advertiser what the most effective message will be for a particular individual and advise the most opportune time, when that individual is likely to be most receptive to the message. (There is increasing evidence to suggest that this may not necessarily be the most effective use of advertiser’s budgets, but sin scéal eile ... ) If the initial phase of the tech businesses’ ability to amass unprecedented profits in the first decade of the twenty-first century was based on their ability to target sales prospects at an optimal time, the second phase in the second decade was even more outrageously ambitious: the ability to modify the public’s behaviour in accord with the commercial interests of their advertisers. This brings us back to the famous (infamous?) twentieth...