The Age of Surveillance Capitalism. The Fight for the Future at the New Frontier of Power. Profile Books, New York, 2019. 692 pp.

During recent decades the ‘myth of progress’ lost credibility and it’s not hard to see why. Many expectations of human improvement that were supposed to flow from new knowledge, advances in human organisation and successive waves of technical innovation have proved hollow or ambiguous. That’s not to say that there have been no such improvements. But taking these as evidence of overall human improvement requires a kind of mental gymnastics undertaken only by the courageous or the hopelessly misguided. Read more…