Sociology & Political Science
Surveillance Capitalism in 2025: Zuboff Was Right, Now What?
Shoshana Zuboff's 'surveillance capitalism' framework has become the dominant lens for understanding platform power. Five years later, the evidence has strengthened her thesis while revealing dimensions she did not fully anticipate—including AI's role in automating behavioral prediction and the Global South's differential vulnerability.
By Sean K.S. Shin
This blog summarizes research trends based on published paper abstracts. Specific numbers or findings may contain inaccuracies. For scholarly rigor, always consult the original papers cited in each post.
When Shoshana Zuboff published The Age of Surveillance Capitalism in 2019, her central thesis—that platform companies extract behavioral data from users, process it into predictions of future behavior, and sell those predictions in "behavioral futures markets"—was met with a mixture of acclaim and skepticism. Critics argued that the framework was too totalizing, that it underestimated user agency, and that it conflated advertising (which is old) with behavioral modification (which was speculative).
Six years later, the evidence has largely vindicated Zuboff's framework while revealing dimensions that require extension. The extraction of behavioral data has intensified with generative AI, which consumes not merely clickstream data but the full texture of human expression—conversations, creative works, emotional responses—as training material. The behavioral prediction apparatus has become more sophisticated through reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) and AI-powered personalization. And the geographic expansion of surveillance capitalism into the Global South has created new patterns of data extraction that Zuboff's primarily US-focused analysis did not fully address.
AI and Consumer Subjectivity
Marchand, Durand, and Dubois (2025) interrogate the transformative implications of AI on contemporary marketing, situating it within broader ethical, epistemic, civic, and socio-political frameworks. Departing from accounts that celebrate efficiency and personalization, the paper adopts a critical perspective that examines how AI-powered marketing reshapes consumer subjectivity itself.
The argument extends Zuboff's framework in a significant direction: surveillance capitalism does not merely predict behavior—it constructs the behavioral subjects whose behavior it predicts. When AI-powered recommendation systems determine what products a consumer sees, what prices they are offered, and what information shapes their purchasing decisions, the consumer's "choice" is not the autonomous act that market theory assumes. The consumer is simultaneously the data source, the prediction target, and the product that is sold to advertisers.
Peace (2024) critically examines the intersection of Section 230 of the US Communications Decency Act and surveillance capitalism. Using Gonzalez v. Google LLC as a case study, the paper discusses how the legal framework that protects platforms from liability for user-generated content simultaneously enables the data extraction practices that surveillance capitalism depends on.
Section 230 was designed to encourage platforms to moderate content without facing liability for the content they host. But it has also been interpreted to shield platforms from liability for their data extraction practices—on the grounds that data collection is part of the "interactive computer service" that Section 230 protects. The paper proposes alternative strategies for protecting user privacy that do not depend on repealing Section 230 (which would create other problems) but rather on creating affirmative privacy obligations that operate alongside platform immunity.
Critical Political Economy
Fuchs (2024) provides the theoretically deepest analysis in this cohort, outlining foundations of a critical theory of digital capitalism. The approach of the Critique of Political Economy is taken as the starting point for theorizing digital capitalism.
Fuchs situates surveillance capitalism within the longer history of capitalist development, arguing that it is not a new form of capitalism but a new expression of capitalism's fundamental logic: the extraction of surplus value from labor. In surveillance capitalism, the "labor" being exploited is not factory work but digital participation—the clicks, searches, posts, and interactions through which users produce the behavioral data that platforms monetize.
This theoretical framing has practical implications. If surveillance capitalism is understood as a new form of labor exploitation, then the remedies developed for traditional labor exploitation—regulation, unionization, collective bargaining, public ownership—become relevant. Data cooperatives, platform cooperatives, and data labor unions represent attempts to apply collective action frameworks to digital extraction.
Non-Western Surveillance Capitalism
Nefedchenko, Hladchenko, and Hlushakova (2025) provide an in-depth exploration of surveillance capitalism within the Ukrainian context, examining how personal data have become the most valuable resource of the 21st century and how mechanisms of extraction, commodification, and behavioral prediction shape both market dynamics and social relations.
The paper analyzes how major Ukrainian companies—such as Rozetka, YouScan, and Kyivstar—employ data-driven strategies for user profiling, targeted advertising, and predictive analytics. These case studies illustrate how Ukrainian digital actors are not merely passive recipients of global technological trends but active participants in the expansion of surveillance capitalism, contributing to its hybrid local forms. The study adapts Zuboff's framework to the specific realities of Eastern European digital transformation, addressing the ethical, legal, and socio-political implications including privacy erosion, digital inequality, and manipulation of consumer behavior.
Cultural Analysis: The Circle
Mohammed Ali (2025) provides a literary analysis of Dave Eggers' The Circle through the lens of surveillance capitalism. The study examines the novel using Zuboff's framework, focusing on how the commodification of personal data functions as a mechanism for corporate exploitation.
The inclusion of literary analysis in surveillance capitalism scholarship serves an important function: it makes the abstract mechanisms of data extraction emotionally accessible. Where academic analysis explains how surveillance capitalism works, literary representation shows what it feels like to live within it—the gradual normalization of total transparency, the social pressure to share, and the erosion of private selfhood that surveillance capitalism produces.
Claims and Evidence
<
| Claim | Evidence | Verdict |
|---|
| Surveillance capitalism extracts behavioral data for prediction markets | Zuboff's framework reinforced by all five papers | ✅ Supported |
| AI-powered marketing reshapes consumer subjectivity | Marchand et al. (2025): consumers are constructed, not merely predicted | ✅ Supported (theoretical) |
| Section 230 enables surveillance capitalism | Peace (2024): platform immunity shields data extraction from liability | ✅ Supported |
| Surveillance capitalism operates identically across all contexts | Nefedchenko et al. (2025): Ukrainian case reveals hybrid local forms and differential dynamics in Eastern European digital transformation | ❌ Refuted |
| Individual consent is a meaningful protection against surveillance capitalism | All papers: structural power asymmetry makes individual consent ineffective | ❌ Refuted |
Open Questions
Can data ownership reform address surveillance capitalism? If users owned their data and could sell it, would this create a fair market or merely legitimize extraction by putting a price on it?Is surveillance capitalism compatible with democracy? If behavioral prediction enables micro-targeted political manipulation, does surveillance capitalism undermine the informed consent on which democratic legitimacy depends?Can public platforms replace surveillance-funded ones? Public broadcasting provides a precedent for publicly funded media. Can public social media platforms—funded by taxes rather than data extraction—provide viable alternatives?How does generative AI change the surveillance capitalism equation? When AI models are trained on the totality of human expression online, the extraction is not merely of behavioral data but of creative, intellectual, and emotional output. Does this represent a qualitative escalation?Implications
Surveillance capitalism has proven to be a durable and analytically productive framework. The evidence assembled since Zuboff's original formulation has strengthened the core thesis while revealing that the phenomenon varies across geographies, political systems, and technological phases.
The practical question is no longer whether surveillance capitalism exists—the debate has moved beyond diagnosis to prescription. What institutional innovations—data trusts, platform cooperatives, privacy-preserving AI, public digital infrastructure—can constrain the extraction of behavioral surplus while preserving the genuine utility that digital platforms provide? This is the regulatory and design challenge of the coming decade.
When Shoshana Zuboff published The Age of Surveillance Capitalism in 2019, her central thesis—that platform companies extract behavioral data from users, process it into predictions of future behavior, and sell those predictions in "behavioral futures markets"—was met with a mixture of acclaim and skepticism. Critics argued that the framework was too totalizing, that it underestimated user agency, and that it conflated advertising (which is old) with behavioral modification (which was speculative).
Six years later, the evidence has largely vindicated Zuboff's framework while revealing dimensions that require extension. The extraction of behavioral data has intensified with generative AI, which consumes not merely clickstream data but the full texture of human expression—conversations, creative works, emotional responses—as training material. The behavioral prediction apparatus has become more sophisticated through reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) and AI-powered personalization. And the geographic expansion of surveillance capitalism into the Global South has created new patterns of data extraction that Zuboff's primarily US-focused analysis did not fully address.
AI and Consumer Subjectivity
Marchand, Durand, and Dubois (2025) interrogate the transformative implications of AI on contemporary marketing, situating it within broader ethical, epistemic, civic, and socio-political frameworks. Departing from accounts that celebrate efficiency and personalization, the paper adopts a critical perspective that examines how AI-powered marketing reshapes consumer subjectivity itself.
The argument extends Zuboff's framework in a significant direction: surveillance capitalism does not merely predict behavior—it constructs the behavioral subjects whose behavior it predicts. When AI-powered recommendation systems determine what products a consumer sees, what prices they are offered, and what information shapes their purchasing decisions, the consumer's "choice" is not the autonomous act that market theory assumes. The consumer is simultaneously the data source, the prediction target, and the product that is sold to advertisers.
Section 230 and Platform Privacy
Peace (2024) critically examines the intersection of Section 230 of the US Communications Decency Act and surveillance capitalism. Using Gonzalez v. Google LLC as a case study, the paper discusses how the legal framework that protects platforms from liability for user-generated content simultaneously enables the data extraction practices that surveillance capitalism depends on.
Section 230 was designed to encourage platforms to moderate content without facing liability for the content they host. But it has also been interpreted to shield platforms from liability for their data extraction practices—on the grounds that data collection is part of the "interactive computer service" that Section 230 protects. The paper proposes alternative strategies for protecting user privacy that do not depend on repealing Section 230 (which would create other problems) but rather on creating affirmative privacy obligations that operate alongside platform immunity.
Critical Political Economy
Fuchs (2024) provides the theoretically deepest analysis in this cohort, outlining foundations of a critical theory of digital capitalism. The approach of the Critique of Political Economy is taken as the starting point for theorizing digital capitalism.
Fuchs situates surveillance capitalism within the longer history of capitalist development, arguing that it is not a new form of capitalism but a new expression of capitalism's fundamental logic: the extraction of surplus value from labor. In surveillance capitalism, the "labor" being exploited is not factory work but digital participation—the clicks, searches, posts, and interactions through which users produce the behavioral data that platforms monetize.
This theoretical framing has practical implications. If surveillance capitalism is understood as a new form of labor exploitation, then the remedies developed for traditional labor exploitation—regulation, unionization, collective bargaining, public ownership—become relevant. Data cooperatives, platform cooperatives, and data labor unions represent attempts to apply collective action frameworks to digital extraction.
Non-Western Surveillance Capitalism
Nefedchenko, Hladchenko, and Hlushakova (2025) provide an in-depth exploration of surveillance capitalism within the Ukrainian context, examining how personal data have become the most valuable resource of the 21st century and how mechanisms of extraction, commodification, and behavioral prediction shape both market dynamics and social relations.
The paper analyzes how major Ukrainian companies—such as Rozetka, YouScan, and Kyivstar—employ data-driven strategies for user profiling, targeted advertising, and predictive analytics. These case studies illustrate how Ukrainian digital actors are not merely passive recipients of global technological trends but active participants in the expansion of surveillance capitalism, contributing to its hybrid local forms. The study adapts Zuboff's framework to the specific realities of Eastern European digital transformation, addressing the ethical, legal, and socio-political implications including privacy erosion, digital inequality, and manipulation of consumer behavior.
Cultural Analysis: The Circle
Mohammed Ali (2025) provides a literary analysis of Dave Eggers' The Circle through the lens of surveillance capitalism. The study examines the novel using Zuboff's framework, focusing on how the commodification of personal data functions as a mechanism for corporate exploitation.
The inclusion of literary analysis in surveillance capitalism scholarship serves an important function: it makes the abstract mechanisms of data extraction emotionally accessible. Where academic analysis explains how surveillance capitalism works, literary representation shows what it feels like to live within it—the gradual normalization of total transparency, the social pressure to share, and the erosion of private selfhood that surveillance capitalism produces.
Claims and Evidence
<
| Claim | Evidence | Verdict |
|---|
| Surveillance capitalism extracts behavioral data for prediction markets | Zuboff's framework reinforced by all five papers | ✅ Supported |
| AI-powered marketing reshapes consumer subjectivity | Marchand et al. (2025): consumers are constructed, not merely predicted | ✅ Supported (theoretical) |
| Section 230 enables surveillance capitalism | Peace (2024): platform immunity shields data extraction from liability | ✅ Supported |
| Surveillance capitalism operates identically across all contexts | Nefedchenko et al. (2025): Ukrainian case reveals hybrid local forms and differential dynamics in Eastern European digital transformation | ❌ Refuted |
| Individual consent is a meaningful protection against surveillance capitalism | All papers: structural power asymmetry makes individual consent ineffective | ❌ Refuted |
Open Questions
Can data ownership reform address surveillance capitalism? If users owned their data and could sell it, would this create a fair market or merely legitimize extraction by putting a price on it?Is surveillance capitalism compatible with democracy? If behavioral prediction enables micro-targeted political manipulation, does surveillance capitalism undermine the informed consent on which democratic legitimacy depends?Can public platforms replace surveillance-funded ones? Public broadcasting provides a precedent for publicly funded media. Can public social media platforms—funded by taxes rather than data extraction—provide viable alternatives?How does generative AI change the surveillance capitalism equation? When AI models are trained on the totality of human expression online, the extraction is not merely of behavioral data but of creative, intellectual, and emotional output. Does this represent a qualitative escalation?Implications
Surveillance capitalism has proven to be a durable and analytically productive framework. The evidence assembled since Zuboff's original formulation has strengthened the core thesis while revealing that the phenomenon varies across geographies, political systems, and technological phases.
The practical question is no longer whether surveillance capitalism exists—the debate has moved beyond diagnosis to prescription. What institutional innovations—data trusts, platform cooperatives, privacy-preserving AI, public digital infrastructure—can constrain the extraction of behavioral surplus while preserving the genuine utility that digital platforms provide? This is the regulatory and design challenge of the coming decade.
References (5)
[1] Marchand, É., Durand, T., & Dubois, M. (2025). Surveillance Capitalism, Consumer Subjectivity and Marketing in the Age of Artificial Intelligence. Social Sciences & Computing, 2025, 001.
[2] Peace, A. (2024). Rethinking Section 230: Toward alternative strategies for protecting user privacy in the age of surveillance capitalism. World Journal of Advanced Research and Reviews, 24(3), 3445.
[3] Fuchs, C. (2024). Critical Theory Foundations of Digital Capitalism. tripleC, 22(1), 1454.
[4] Nefedchenko, O., Hladchenko, O., & Hlushakova, O. (2025). UKRAINIAN MEDIA IN THE AGE OF SURVEILLANCE CAPITALISM: FROM COMMUNICATION TO BEHAVIORAL PREDICTION. FTRK, 17(2), 10. )-10.
[5] Mohammed Ali, D.A. (2025). Surveillance Capitalism: A Critical Analysis of The Circle by Dave Eggers. Kurdistan Journal of Humanities and Social Sciences, 8(1), 450–456.