Anti-AIPerson

Shoshana Zuboff

Author of The Age of Surveillance Capitalism

Harvard Business School professor emerita whose landmark book The Age of Surveillance Capitalism framed Big Tech’s data economy as an extractive threat to democracy — and who now argues AI is simply that same machine “continuing to evolve and expand.”

Academic Author Tech

Wikipedia El País interview

In her words

AI is simply surveillance capitalism continuing to evolve and expand with some new methodologies, but still based on theft.

— El País, 2025

What we ran to with open arms has actually become a surveillance prison with no bars or guards, but also no exit, no escape.

— El País, 2025

Biography

Shoshana Zuboff (born 1951) is a professor emerita at Harvard Business School and the leading theorist of what she named “surveillance capitalism” — an economic order that claims private human experience as free raw material, converting behavior into data, predictions, and profit. Her 2019 book The Age of Surveillance Capitalism became one of the defining critiques of the modern tech industry.

AI as surveillance capitalism, evolved

Zuboff sees the generative-AI boom not as a break from the data economy she chronicled but as its next stage. In a December 2025 El País interview she said AI remains “still based on theft,” drawing a straight line from Google’s early, quiet harvesting of search data to the scraping of books, journalism, art, and voices to train today’s models. She has announced that her next book, planned for 2026, will update her 2019 analysis with a focus squarely on artificial intelligence.

Her prescription is legal, not technical: she credits Europe’s Digital Services Act, Digital Markets Act, and AI Act as the only meaningful counterforce, and urges EU leaders not to soften them under pressure from Washington — telling El País that “this is the time to be fierce.” Critics, particularly economists, counter that “surveillance capitalism” stretches to cover too much and that users demonstrably value the free services built on their data; Zuboff’s answer is that consent extracted without understanding is not consent at all.