Born in 1951, academic and author Shoshana Zuboff earned a PhD in social psychology from Harvard and became one of the first tenured women at Harvard Business School. Since 2014 she has been writing about the role of big data and commercial surveillance in the digital era. Last year she published her third book, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, which became a bestseller and has been described by Zadie Smith as “easily the most important book to be published this century”.
1. Music
DJ Shadow: Our Pathetic Age
This is a powerful compilation of rap music featuring a range of amazing artists: people like Nas, Ghostface Killah, De La Soul. Many of the songs take aim at what I have called “surveillance capitalism” and its power to influence, degrade and control our feelings and behaviours. Many lyrics blaze with insight and the righteous outrage crucial to public awakening. The album names these hidden forces, assuring us that our sense of menace is not paranoia, but recognition of “our generation’s form of nuclear power”. As one rap counsels, “How we deal with this will be the stuff of history.”
2. Food
Sacha Finkelsztajn, Paris
During a recent week in Paris we were dazzled by many beautiful dinners. But best of all was an afternoon roaming the Jewish Quarter in the Marais, where my son Jake and I collected golden crepes with butter and sugar and massive pittas stuffed with falafel. Sacha Finkelsztajn is a bright yellow-fronted delicatessen, and we laid out our treasures and ordered more: empanadas, pastrami, pastries filled with sweet poppy seed paste. Powered by mugs of hot coffee, we smiled, laughed, and ate joyously for an hour.
3. Exhibition
Albrecht Dürer at the Albertina Museum, Vienna
This extraordinary exhibition of over 200 paintings, drawings and prints follows the journey of Dürer’s life and his otherworldly mastery. You can see his genius building as painstaking studies of hands, fingers, leaves, wings, flowers are reborn in large, complex compositions. There are some revered pieces, like Young Hare, and others rarely on display. The palpable force of his commitment to the world as it is, his uncanny insight and his breathtaking technical skill moved me deeply. The centuries that separate our existences seemed to melt away, leaving only the human struggle that we share.
4. Book
The Overstory by Richard Powers
I find it impossible to live without the presence of trees: they focus me on what is most enduring. This Pulitzer-winning novel unfurls from the point of view of trees, creatures that grow stronger with age and die only when attacked from without – just the opposite of humans. Powers’s exquisite and soul-wrenching work is a tragic exploration of the wisdom and generosity of an Earth now doomed by modernity’s perverse refusal to embrace the non-human orders of life upon which everything depends, including now our very survival. This novel left me feeling sanctified, even as each page drove me mad.
5. Play
Burn This, on Broadway
Earlier this year I saw a revival of this Lanford Wilson play about grief, how it undoes us and remakes us. Adam Driver plays a character whose younger brother is revealed to him only after his sudden death. Driver’s performance was Shakespearean: one of the most extraordinary experiences of theatre I’ve had. It reminded me that a single actor, on stage as in life, can have a transformational effect. Driver gave body and soul with an incandescent ferocity that taught me and changed me – something I didn’t anticipate and will never forget.
6. Places
Berlin and Normandy
I am moved by the seriousness with which Berlin memorialises the Holocaust, such as with Track 17 at Grunewald train station, where Jewish families were sent to their murder; or the Wall of Mirrors, where ordinary people see only their own reflections. In Schöneberg, panels hang from lampposts displaying the edicts from 1933 onward that deprived Jewish people of their rights. A week later my children and I stood on Normandy’s Omaha Beach and wept for the young men who gave their lives to end such evil.
