John Tasioulas

The challenges to humanity posed by the digital future, the first detailed examination of the unprecedented form of power called "surveillance capitalism," and the quest by powerful corporations to predict and control our behavior. In this masterwork of original thinking and research, Shoshana Zuboff provides startling insights into the phenomenon that she has named surveillance capitalism. The stakes could not be higher: a global architecture of behavior modification threatens human nature in the twenty-first century just as industrial capitalism disfigured the natural world in the twentieth. Zuboff vividly brings to life the consequences as surveillance capitalism advances from Silicon Valley into every economic sector. Vast wealth and power are accumulated in ominous new "behavioral futures markets," where predictions about our behavior are bought and sold, and the production of goods and services is subordinated to a new "means of behavioral modification." The threat has shifted from a totalitarian Big Brother state to a ubiquitous digital architecture: a "Big Other" operating in the interests of surveillance capital. Here is the crucible of an unprecedented form of power marked by extreme concentrations of knowledge and free from democratic oversight. Zuboff's comprehensive and moving analysis lays bare the threats to twenty-first century society: a controlled "hive" of total connection that seduces with promises of total certainty for maximum profit -- at the expense of democracy, freedom, and our human future. With little resistance from law or society, surveillance capitalism is on the verge of dominating the social order and shaping the digital future -- if we let it.

How can we improve our ethical beliefs? How great are our capacities for moral improvement? What constitutes a good life? What role can philosophy play in answering these questions? In this important new book, one of our leading moral philosophers looks at central issues of ethics and emerges with the fullest and most elegant account of his fundamental ethical theory. James Griffin examines influential schools of ethical thought and finds deontology, virtue ethics, and most forms of utilitarianism to be overly ambitious. He argues that ethics cannot be what philosophers in these traditions expect because agents cannot be what the philosophies need them to be. Clear, compelling, and original, this new account of ethics will be of interest to anyone concerned with thinking about values: not only philosophers but legal, political, and economic theorists as well.