Zuboff, S. (2019) | References | Narcissus and the Child

What This Research Found

Shoshana Zuboff's The Age of Surveillance Capitalism documents an economic logic that has fundamentally transformed the digital world and, through it, human experience itself. Her analysis reveals that the "free" services provided by technology companies are not free at all; they are funded by a new form of extraction that claims human experience as raw material.

The discovery of behavioural surplus: Zuboff traces surveillance capitalism's origins to Google in the early 2000s. The company discovered that the data collected from user searches contained more information than needed to improve the service. This "behavioural surplus"--data about users rather than for users--could be fed into machine learning systems to produce predictions about what users would do, click, or buy. These predictions became products sold to advertisers, creating a new market: behavioural futures. The more data extracted, the better the predictions; the better the predictions, the higher the price advertisers would pay.

The extraction imperative: Once this business model proved wildly profitable, it created an imperative to extract ever more data. This meant expanding surveillance into every domain of human life: browsing history, location tracking, email content, voice recordings, facial recognition, health data, home device monitoring, and ultimately the prediction of emotions, personalities, and future behaviour. Zuboff documents how technology companies have systematically colonised human experience, treating every interaction as potential data to be harvested. The scope of extraction has expanded from online behaviour to offline life through smartphones, smart devices, and public surveillance infrastructure.

The behavioural modification imperative: Prediction alone is not enough. Surveillance capitalists discovered they could intervene in behaviour to push it toward desired outcomes, making predictions more accurate and more valuable. Zuboff calls these "economies of action"--systems designed not just to predict but to shape behaviour. Notification timing, algorithmic curation, intermittent reinforcement schedules, and gamification mechanics all serve this modification goal. Users do not merely have their behaviour observed; they have their behaviour engineered.

The assault on human autonomy: Zuboff argues that surveillance capitalism represents a fundamental threat to what she calls "the right to the future tense"--the capacity for individuals to determine their own lives. When our behaviour is predicted and modified by systems we do not control and cannot see, the foundation of individual autonomy erodes. The promise of digital technology--connection, information, convenience--conceals an architecture of control. We are not the customers of these services, nor even the products. We are the raw material, and the product is predictions about our future behaviour sold to those who wish to influence it.

Instrumentarian power: Zuboff introduces the concept of "instrumentarian power" to describe this new form of social control. Unlike totalitarianism, which operates through violence and overt coercion, instrumentarianism operates through behavioural modification, nudging populations toward desired outcomes without their awareness or meaningful consent. It does not care what you think or feel; it cares only about what you do and whether that behaviour can be predicted and shaped. This represents a fundamentally new threat to human freedom, one that existing political frameworks were not designed to address.

How This Research Is Used in the Book

Zuboff's analysis of surveillance capitalism provides essential context for understanding how digital technology accelerates narcissistic patterns at societal scale. In Chapter 13: The Great Accelerant, her work illuminates the economic forces driving platform design:

"Social media is altering how humans develop identity and perceive reality itself. This is 'surveillance capitalism'--the unilateral claiming of private human experience as free raw material for translation into behavioural data sold into behavioural futures markets."

The book uses Zuboff's framework to explain why social media platforms seem designed to damage mental health: because they are. Platforms optimised for engagement rather than wellbeing exploit the same psychological vulnerabilities that narcissistic abusers exploit. The manipulation is not a bug but a feature--the core of the business model.

The chapter also draws on Zuboff to explain why digital detox remains nearly impossible:

"Corporate surveillance capitalism makes true detox impossible even for those who try. Data collection continues through others' devices and public cameras; the individual who deletes Facebook remains tracked through shadow profiles."

This observation connects to the book's broader argument about narcissistic systems: escape from narcissistic dynamics requires not just individual willpower but systemic change. The surveillance capitalist environment, like the narcissistic family system, creates conditions that make maintaining healthy boundaries extraordinarily difficult.

Why This Matters for Survivors

If you survived narcissistic abuse, Zuboff's analysis may illuminate patterns you recognise viscerally but have struggled to name.

You know what it feels like to be studied. The narcissist in your life observed you carefully--not from genuine interest in your inner world but to predict and control your behaviour. They learned your vulnerabilities, your triggers, your needs, and used this information against you. Zuboff documents how surveillance capitalism operates through the same logic: your data is collected not to serve you but to predict and modify your behaviour for others' benefit. The platforms study you the way your abuser did--to exploit what they learn.

You know what it feels like to have your boundaries violated while being told you consented. The narcissist dismissed your boundaries while insisting you had agreed to whatever they were doing. Surveillance capitalism operates the same way: buried in terms of service no one reads, platforms claim you consented to data extraction most users don't understand is happening. Gaslighting at scale tells users they chose this, that they have "privacy controls," that they can opt out--while the architecture ensures meaningful choice is nearly impossible.

You know what coercive control feels like. The narcissist didn't need to hit you to control you; they controlled the environment, the information, the emotional temperature. Zuboff documents how platforms exercise what she calls "instrumentarian power"--control through architecture rather than force, shaping behaviour through design choices that feel like free choices but are carefully constrained. The constant checking, the compulsive scrolling, the anxiety when your phone is in another room--these are not failures of willpower. They are designed outcomes of systems built to create exactly these responses.

You know what it means to exist as supply. Chapter 1 of Narcissus and the Child describes how narcissists treat others as sources of "narcissistic supply"--validation, attention, emotional resources to be extracted. Zuboff reveals that surveillance capitalism treats all of us this way: our attention is extracted and sold, our behaviour predicted and modified, our lived experience commodified as raw material. You are not paranoid to sense that the platforms want something from you. You are accurately perceiving an extractive relationship.

You learned to trust your instincts again. Recovery from narcissistic abuse often involves reconnecting with intuitions that were dismissed, gaslit, and trained out of you. If social media makes you feel bad in ways you struggle to explain, if you sense something predatory in the platforms' constant demands for engagement, if the "free" services feel like they're costing you something essential--trust that perception. Zuboff's research validates what your nervous system is telling you: something is being taken from you, and the systems assuring you everything is fine are not honest.

Clinical Implications

For clinicians working with survivors of narcissistic abuse and others affected by technology's impact on mental health, Zuboff's framework offers several important considerations.

Recognise technology use as an environmental factor. Just as clinicians assess living situations, relationships, and stressors, technology use deserves attention as a factor shaping mental health. Ask about social media use, smartphone habits, and the emotional quality of online experiences. For survivors of narcissistic abuse, the retraumatising potential of platforms that replicate abuse dynamics deserves specific attention. Assessment should explore whether digital environments are helping or hindering recovery.

Understand the limits of individual intervention. Zuboff's analysis reveals that problematic technology use often reflects rational responses to deliberately manipulative systems, not simply individual pathology or poor choices. Treatment that focuses solely on individual behaviour change without acknowledging the environmental factors maintaining symptoms may reproduce the dynamic of blaming victims for responding predictably to abusive systems. Validate that setting boundaries with technology is genuinely difficult because the systems are designed to make it difficult.

Help clients distinguish authentic needs from manufactured ones. Surveillance capitalism profits by creating needs it can then claim to satisfy: the need to check notifications, the need to stay current, the need for more likes, the need to document experiences to make them real. These manufactured needs can crowd out authentic ones. Help clients reconnect with their genuine needs for connection, rest, presence, and meaning--and recognise when technology use is substituting stimulation for satisfaction.

Consider digital boundaries as part of safety planning. For survivors of narcissistic abuse, particularly those who experienced stalking or coercive control, digital privacy may be essential to safety. Help clients assess their digital exposure, understand how data can be used against them, and develop strategies for protecting their information. Recognise that the surveillance architecture Zuboff describes may have been weaponised by their abuser and that protecting digital privacy is part of protecting physical and psychological safety.

Address the social media-mental health connection directly. The research supports a causal relationship between social media use and mental health deterioration, particularly among adolescents. Clinicians should feel confident discussing reducing or eliminating social media use as a therapeutic intervention. Frame this not as deprivation but as reclaiming attention and protecting mental health from systems designed to exploit vulnerability.

Support collective as well as individual change. Zuboff argues that individual choices, while important, cannot solve a systemic problem. Clinicians can support clients in advocacy, community organising, and political engagement around technology regulation. For some clients, channelling frustration into collective action may be therapeutic in itself, transforming helplessness into agency.

Broader Implications

The Parallel Between Narcissistic Abuse and Surveillance Capitalism

The structural parallels between narcissistic abuse dynamics and surveillance capitalism's operations deserve careful attention. Both involve:

Exploitation disguised as relationship. The narcissist claims to love you while extracting emotional resources. The platform claims to serve you while extracting behavioural data. Both disguise exploitation as care, taking while appearing to give.

Instrumentalisation of the other. Narcissists treat others as objects to serve their needs, lacking recognition of others' autonomous existence and genuine needs. Surveillance capitalism similarly treats users as raw material rather than as persons with rights and interests that matter independently of their extractable value.

Boundary violations justified by pseudo-consent. The narcissist insists you agreed to what they're doing, reframing violations as acceptable because you didn't explicitly refuse or because they interpret your behaviour as implicit acceptance. Surveillance capitalism operates the same way, burying consent in unreadable terms of service and treating participation as permission for extraction.

Learned helplessness and cognitive dissonance. Living with a narcissist often produces the sense that resistance is futile and the strange experience of knowing something is wrong while doubting your own perception. Surveillance capitalism produces parallel effects: users sense their data is being used against their interests but feel unable to change the situation, and the platforms' reassurances create dissonance with lived experience.

The impossibility of "no contact". Survivors of narcissistic abuse often find that the abuser continues to intrude through third parties, shared connections, and the echoes left in their own psyche. Digital surveillance similarly makes complete withdrawal nearly impossible--shadow profiles, embedded tracking, and the infrastructure of daily life ensure continued extraction even for those who try to leave.

The Generation Raised Under Surveillance

Children growing up today have never known a world without surveillance capitalism. Their data has been collected since before birth--ultrasound photos shared on Facebook, names registered on mailing lists, digital footprints accumulating from infancy. Zuboff's analysis raises urgent questions about what this means for human development.

When children learn that every moment can be documented and shared, that their value lies in engagement metrics, that their emotional expressions are content for their parents' platforms, what sense of self can form? The boundaries between public and private dissolve before they can be established. The capacity for authentic experience--moments that belong to oneself alone--may be stunted when every experience is potential content.

The implications for attachment are particularly concerning. Chapter 10 of Narcissus and the Child describes how children need attuned, present caregivers to develop secure attachment. When caregivers are perpetually distracted by devices, when the child must compete with notifications for attention, the conditions for secure attachment are compromised. The child learns what Sherry Turkle calls being "alone together"--physically present but emotionally unavailable.

For adolescents developing identity, the surveillance capitalist environment presents particular dangers. Identity formation requires experimentation, which requires privacy--the ability to try on different selves without permanent record. When every post is immortalised, every photo searchable, every adolescent statement potentially discoverable by future employers or partners, the space for identity exploration shrinks. The developmental tasks of adolescence become risky in ways they never were before.

Reclaiming Human Futures

Zuboff's book concludes with a call to reclaim what surveillance capitalism threatens: the right to the future tense, the possibility of human lives shaped by human choices rather than algorithmic prediction and modification.

For survivors of narcissistic abuse, this call may resonate deeply. You survived someone who tried to define your reality, control your choices, and shape your future according to their needs rather than yours. You know what it means to reclaim your own narrative, to assert your right to determine your own life. The skills you developed--recognising manipulation, maintaining boundaries, reconnecting with your authentic self, demanding to be seen as a person rather than an object--are exactly the skills needed to resist surveillance capitalism's instrumentarian power.

Recovery from narcissistic abuse often involves reclaiming privacy--the ability to have thoughts, feelings, and experiences that belong only to you. This is precisely what surveillance capitalism threatens at scale. Protecting your privacy from platforms that demand access to your inner life is an extension of the same boundary-setting you learned to do with your abuser.

Recovery also involves reconnecting with authentic needs and desires after having them subordinated to the narcissist's demands. Surveillance capitalism creates artificial needs--the need to check, to scroll, to be seen, to document--that crowd out authentic ones. Reclaiming your attention from platforms designed to hijack it is an extension of the same work: distinguishing what you actually need from what someone else programmed you to want.

Most profoundly, recovery involves reclaiming the future tense: the belief that you can shape your own life, that tomorrow is not predetermined by yesterday's patterns, that change and growth are possible. Surveillance capitalism threatens this at civilisational scale, creating futures defined by prediction rather than possibility. Resisting this requires the same faith that survivors draw on: that human beings are not merely products of their past or raw material for others' purposes, but agents capable of authoring their own lives.

Limitations and Considerations

Zuboff's analysis, while groundbreaking, has important limitations that inform how we apply it.

The book is primarily diagnostic, not prescriptive. While Zuboff argues compellingly that surveillance capitalism poses an existential threat, her policy recommendations remain relatively general. The question of how to regulate these systems while preserving technology's genuine benefits remains open and contested.

Individual variation in vulnerability and harm. Not everyone who uses social media experiences equal harm. Research suggests adolescents, particularly girls, and those with pre-existing mental health conditions are most vulnerable. Those with secure attachment histories and strong offline relationships may be more resilient to platform manipulation. Zuboff's systemic analysis sometimes obscures these important individual differences.

Cultural and global variation. Zuboff's analysis centres on Silicon Valley companies and Western contexts. How surveillance capitalism operates in different cultural settings, under different regulatory frameworks, and in the Global South deserves continued investigation. The dynamics she describes may manifest differently across contexts.

The pace of change. The specific examples Zuboff documents from the early 2010s have already evolved. New platforms (TikTok), new technologies (generative AI), and new business models continue emerging. While the underlying logic she identifies persists, its specific manifestations change rapidly.

The risk of technological determinism. Zuboff's emphasis on systemic forces can sometimes obscure individual and collective agency. While she ultimately argues for democratic intervention, the portrayal of surveillance capitalism's reach and power may inadvertently reinforce the helplessness it describes.

Historical Context

The Age of Surveillance Capitalism appeared in 2019 at a moment of growing public concern about technology's social impact. The Cambridge Analytica scandal of 2018 had revealed how personal data could be harvested and weaponised for political manipulation. Congressional hearings had begun questioning Big Tech's power. The European Union's General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) had taken effect, representing the first major regulatory response to data extraction.

Zuboff's book provided the conceptual framework that public discourse had been missing. "Surveillance capitalism" named what people sensed but could not articulate: that the bargain of "free" services in exchange for data was more exploitative than it appeared, that platform design served corporate rather than user interests, and that something fundamental about human freedom was at stake.

The book built on Zuboff's decades of scholarship on the relationship between technology, work, and society. Her 1988 book In the Age of the Smart Machine had pioneered the study of how information technology transforms organisations; her concept of "surveillance capitalism," first articulated in 2014, emerged from extending this analysis to consumer technology and big data. The Age of Surveillance Capitalism synthesised this thinking into a comprehensive framework while drawing on political economy, psychology, and technology studies.

Since publication, the book has influenced policy discussions globally. Its concepts have been cited in legislative debates, regulatory proceedings, and academic research across disciplines. The term "surveillance capitalism" has entered common usage, shaping how journalists, activists, and the public discuss technology's social impact. Zuboff's framework has become essential vocabulary for understanding the digital economy's operation and its implications for human futures.

The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power

APA Citation