The Digital Arms Race in the Age of Surveillance Capitalism

Abstract

American social psychologist Shoshana Zuboff describes and presents in her recent book “The Age of Surveillance Capitalism” the theory that explains changes of contemporary capitalism. She calls it “surveillance capitalism” and indicates its crucial role in transformations of social control systems. The aim of this paper is to consider the relationship between “surveillance capitalism” and the global security landscape. We will consider the hypothesis that “surveillance capitalism” is a ac-celerator of a modern cyber arms race, similar to classic industrial capitalism as in the case of the Cold War arms race.