Jamal Awil

← The Age of Surveillance Capitalism

All that has changed is that now we are the animals. [definitional]

It was a time when scientists reckoned with the obstinacy of free-roaming animals and concluded that surveillance was the necessary price of knowledge. Locking these creatures in a zoo would only eliminate the very behavior that scientists wanted to study, but how were they to be surveilled? The solutions once concocted by scholars of elk herds, sea turtles, and geese have been refurbished by surveillance capitalists and presented as an inevitable feature of twenty-first-century life on Earth. All that has changed is that now we are the animals.

Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Cap…, loc. 634