An interview with Harvard Business School professor Shoshana Zuboff on her frustrations with fragmented efforts to restrain tech companies, privacy, and more
These are uncertain times for Silicon Valley. Tech companies are firing staff who they hired in the pandemic. Tweets: @fatassinari , @sroach_econ , @patrickfrench , @henrymance , @casparhenderson , @astaniscia86 , and @lukolejnik Tweets: Fabrizio Tassinari / @fatassinari : This is a worthy mission: “The EU's tech laws will create “new cadres of people with new mixes of skills that are going to go inside the corporations. Their brief will be to lift the hood, to understand what's really going on.” https://giftarticle.ft.com/... Stephen Roach / @sroach_econ : Which is worse — China's state sponsored censorship or the surveillance capitalism of western democracies? Zuboff's provocative critique argues that big tech and democracy are ultimately incompatible. See “Accidental Conflict” Ch 8. https://www.ft.com/... Patrick French / @patrickfrench : Shoshana Zuboff —"Our information spaces must exist under public law and be governed by democratic institutions ... we will look back on the days of the information oligarchs like Musk and Zuckerberg as the first primitive missteps of a new civilisation." https://www.ft.com/... Henry Mance / @henrymance : “Privacy is now a zombie category. None of us have privacy, even as we thought about it in the year 2000.” - my interview with Shoshana Zuboff, author of The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, who is not overly relieved by the stumbles of Big Tech https://www.ft.com/... Caspar Henderson / @casparhenderson : ...With luck and determination we will look back on the days of the information oligarchs like Musk and Zuckerberg as the first primitive missteps of a new civilisation." @shoshanazuboff talking to @henrymance https://www.ft.com/... Giulio S. / @astaniscia86 : Shoshana Zuboff is against the tech surveillance capitalism but at the same time she expects to surveil tech companies from the inside out. The debate around privacy is gone too far. https://www.ft.com/... https://twitter.com/... Lukasz Olejnik / @lukolejnik : For the first time in history we're able to do long distance communication in ways impossible to monitor. Sounds like a renaissance, not extinguish. A lot of privacy gains are real, though to benefit from some one may need to know some things about tech. https://www.ft.com/... https://twitter.com/...
Context & Ripple Effects
Nearly four years after the profile that cemented her 'surveillance capitalism' coinage, Zuboff's FT interview reads less like vindication than an indictment of execution: the restraint she demanded arrived piecemeal, and she now dismisses meaningful privacy as a 'zombie category'.
The interview lands mid-arc in this coverage — from the argument that big tech grew powerful by ducking regulation to Zuckerberg's manifesto-era bid for self-correction — and sharpens the question into whether democracies, rather than founders, govern information spaces.
First-order effects
- EU tech laws begin producing what Zuboff describes as 'new cadres' of people embedded inside corporations to lift the hood on their operations, moving scrutiny from outside watchdogs to internal auditors.
- Zuboff's 'zombie category' verdict on privacy strips a premise from reform debates, pushing US and EU policymakers to justify tech rules on democratic-governance grounds rather than data protection alone.
Second-order effects
- Fragmented restraint efforts let platforms such as Facebook and Musk's operations shop among jurisdictions instead of facing a unified regime — the very dynamic behind the 'information oligarchs' Zuboff names.
- Founders who once answered criticism with manifestos and self-correction, Zuckerberg chief among them, now confront a framework where legitimacy comes from public law rather than personal course changes.
Third-order effects
- If Zuboff's prescription holds, information spaces move under public law and democratic institutions, making embedded regulatory staff a permanent feature of corporate structure rather than a crisis response.
- The path she warns against — continued piecemeal restraint — points toward the slow platform decay the 'enshittocene' diagnosis later traced, where weak competition, regulation, and worker power compound each other.
The trend: Platform governance is migrating from founder self-regulation toward public-law oversight, with the EU's embedded-auditor model emerging as the template Zuboff has argued for since coining 'surveillance capitalism'.