Surveillance Capitalism or Democracy?

Translation from English by Artem Smirnov. – Moscow: Gaidar Institute Press, 2025. – 360 p.

ISBN 978-5-93255-692-4

Surveillance capitalism emerged from the retreat of democracy. Over two decades, it has evolved into a global system that fails the test of responsible digital governance. The giants of this system have created an overarching political and economic order with oligopolistic control over digital spaces. At the heart of the development of surveillance capitalism is the commercialization of human behavior through the large-scale extraction of human-generated data. The economic concentration of power develops into a social oligarchy.

Zuboff sees surveillance capitalism as a unified field of institutional development through four stages, each of which sets the stage for the next and is characterized by new economic transactions, managerial capture, and social harm. The conflict between surveillance capitalism and democratic order represents the struggle for control of knowledge in the digital age. The anti-democratic imperatives of surveillance capitalism create a situation where either its or democracy's existence is possible, but not both at the same time.