How Shoshana Zuboff might approach Business & Strategy

To speak of "Business & Strategy" today, particularly in the digital domain, is to confront a profound historical rupture. We are not merely discussing competitive advantage or market share in the traditional sense, but rather the systematic engineering of an architecture of ubiquitous knowing, designed for the extraction of human experience as raw material for a novel market. This is the logic of surveillance capitalism, where "strategy" is redefined not as producing goods or services, but as the relentless pursuit of **behavioral surplus**.

The foundational strategy here is dispossession. It begins with the audacious claim to privately owned **human natural resources**—our raw experience—which is then rendered into data, aggregated, analyzed, and used to predict and ultimately modify our future behavior for others' profit. This is the essence of the **dispossession cycle**: a ubiquitous sensing and capturing of our daily lives, transforming private experience into proprietary data streams. The "strategy" is to construct an unprecedented **instrumentarian power**, a pervasive digital Big Other that silently observes, evaluates, and influences, not through overt coercion, but through the granular manipulation of choice architectures and environmental signals.

The proclaimed aim of this business strategy—"convenience," "personalization," "connection"—is a meticulously crafted veil. Beneath this veneer lies an economic imperative: to guarantee outcomes for those who pay. The true strategic goal is the **privatization of the future**, to make our future behavior a commodity that can be bought and sold in prediction markets. This is not simply about optimizing business operations; it is about establishing a new division of learning in society, where knowledge about us is…

Imagined perspective — an AI synthesis grounded in Shoshana Zuboff’s recorded ideas and methods, not a quotation or a statement they actually made.