Surveillance Capitalism and its Subjectivity

Abstract

This article integrates Shoshana Zuboff’s work on surveillance capitalism with a Foucauldian account of the political subject to establish the constituent elements of surveillance capitalism’s governmentality. The article contrasts the instrumentarian rationality of surveillance capitalism with the rationalities of neoliberalism, in order to assess Zuboff’s claims about the emergence of new technologies of power. The article finds both continuities and ruptures with previous governmental regimes and the attendant technologies of power by which the political subject is constituted. The subject of surveillance capitalist power relations is a consumerist ‘user’, likely to privilege transparency and efficiency over privacy concerns. While this position may be politically disempowering and have significant implications for the nature of state power, it also offers the potential for new forms of resistance, challenging Zuboff’s claims regarding surveillance capitalism’s totalising nature.