The Age of Surveillance Capitalism by Shoshana Zuboff
Published 2019 · 912 pages · 250,000 words · about 17 hours at an average pace · Media & Technology, Nonfiction, Politics & Society
How hard is The Age of Surveillance Capitalism to read?
The Age of Surveillance Capitalism scores 30 out of 100 for difficulty on ReadingRate, making it moderately challenging. The score is a weighted composite of nine measures: four of how hard the prose is to parse, five of how hard the meaning is to extract.
- Vocabulary: 45 out of 100
- Academic vocabulary. Social theory, technology, and economics terminology.
- Sentence structure: 45 out of 100
- Abstraction: 55 out of 100
- Sustained theoretical framework about a new form of capitalism.
- Information density: 55 out of 100
- Dense with evidence, theory, and historical analysis.
- Narrative indirection: 20 out of 100
- Systematic argument with extensive theoretical apparatus.
- Symbolic density: 20 out of 100
- 'Surveillance capitalism' and 'behavioral surplus' are the central conceptual innovations.
- Ironic distance: 15 out of 100
- Zuboff writes with moral urgency rather than irony.
- Resolution withholding: 20 out of 100
- Zuboff diagnoses the problem comprehensively; solutions are less developed.
- Structural complexity: 35 out of 100
- Three parts with extensive theoretical apparatus.
How The Age of Surveillance Capitalism is regarded
The Age of Surveillance Capitalism holds a literary regard score of 50 out of 100, weighing its place in the canon, its critical reception, its influence on other writers, and the standing of its author. Regard is measured separately from difficulty: a demanding book is not necessarily an admired one.