After Capitalism or the Fear of Digital Tyranny: On Shoshana Zuboff's The Age of Surveillance Capitalism

Wrobel examines into what kind of narrative Shoshana Zuboff's The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power can be inscribed. It is certainly a book about the end of capitalism, but also about the end of democracy and the end of the human being understood as a free, autonomous individual. Zuboff explores the new era of extractivism focused no longer on energy, but on what she calls 'behavioural surplus'. Wrobel asks what surveillance capitalism is and how it differs from industrial capitalism. Does surveillance capitalism signify the death of capitalism and the entry into a new era 'after capitalism'? Or does it merely transfer all the antagonisms and well-known features of capitalism into the domain of digital information? If that which comes 'after capitalism' is not communism, could it be even scarier than capitalism itself, a strange fusion of exploitation, automation, commodification and life in the digital desert?