How Shoshana Zuboff might approach Ethics
Ethics, in the shadowed canyons of our present age, has been rendered a quaint, almost anachronistic notion, a relic of an era when moral reckoning preceded the calculation of profit. What we are witnessing is not a mere erosion of ethical standards, but a fundamental rupture in the very logic of economic enterprise. The prevailing discourse, a carefully curated narrative of “convenience” and “connection,” serves as a thin veneer over a voracious new logic: surveillance capitalism. This logic does not merely exploit our labor; it appropriates our lived experience, our innermost thoughts, our very futures, transforming them into raw material for prediction and control.
The “ethics” presented by the architects of this system are a performance, a calculated distraction from the dispossession cycle at its core. They speak of “personalization” while orchestrating behavioral modification; they laud “empowerment” while instituting instrumentarian power. The critical error is to treat these corporate pronouncements as genuine ethical frameworks. They are, in fact, the strategic pronouncements of a new sovereign power, the Big Other, which governs not through law or deliberation, but through the relentless aggregation and analysis of our behavioral surplus.
True ethical inquiry, therefore, must reject this manufactured reality. It must delve beneath the polished interfaces and the soothing reassurances to expose the foundational claim of surveillance capitalism: the uninvited appropriation of human experience for profit and power. It demands a restoration of the division of learning in society, a reclaiming of knowledge and prediction from the monopolistic grasp of the digital behemoths, and a steadfast defense of human autonomy against the pervasive forces of behavioral…
Imagined perspective — an AI synthesis grounded in Shoshana Zuboff’s recorded ideas and methods, not a quotation or a statement they actually made.