Shoshana Zuboff

Shoshana Zuboff spent decades studying the intersection of technology, capitalism and power before coining the term that would define her legacy: surveillance capitalism. As Charles Edward Wilson Professor Emerita at Harvard Business School, she has become one of the most cited and debated voices in the global conversation about how technology companies extract, analyse and monetise human behaviour.

Zuboff trained as a social psychologist, earning her doctorate at Harvard in 1980, and joined the Business School faculty the following year. Her early work, including the 1988 book 'In the Age of the Smart Machine', examined how computerisation was reshaping labour and organisational life. That grounding in workplace technology gave her the analytical tools to later diagnose a much larger shift in how digital platforms treat human experience as raw material.

Her 2019 book, 'The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power', argued that companies such as Google and Meta had pioneered a new economic logic in which personal data, harvested largely without meaningful consent, is used to predict and modify behaviour at scale. The book became an international bestseller, was translated into more than 20 languages, and supplied regulators, journalists and lawmakers worldwide with a vocabulary for describing practices that had previously escaped clear definition. It won the Axel Springer Award in 2019 and cemented her reputation as the field's foremost critic.

Zuboff has since taken her arguments into policy arenas directly, serving on Meta's independent Oversight Board and as a director of the child-safety group 5Rights Foundation, while continuing to publish essays warning of what she calls an 'epistemic coup' by tech platforms over the flow of knowledge and truth. Her framework has influenced landmark regulatory efforts including the EU's Digital Markets Act and Digital Services Act, and is regularly invoked in antitrust and privacy litigation on both sides of the Atlantic.

Now in her role as professor emerita, Zuboff remains an active public intellectual, lecturing widely and continuing to press the case that unregulated data extraction poses a structural risk to democratic self-governance. Her influence rests less on building technology than on reshaping how the world talks about, and legislates against, its excesses.