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All that is solid melts into code

Abstract We review Zuboff’s book, a vast work of contemporary history, social psychology and political economy. Zuboff argues that a contingent configuration of digital technologies, fuelled by teleological utopianism, has created a rogue capitalism wherein reciprocal relationships (apparently ‘organic’ to capitalism as such), both within the firm and in society, have been subverted. Subversion is achieved by unilaterally grabbing user data which are algorithmically processed into ‘behaviour’. With surveillance technologies gradually embedded in everyday objects, data-grabbing enables a seemingly-self-enhancing tailoring of products even as surveillance imperceptibly morphs into control. But these arguments raise a number of questions. Can data map culture? How has digitization transposed control from production to consumption? How does digital abstraction relate to abstraction through commensuration? How is social ontology transformed by the digitization of the physical medium of life?