"Technology makes the world a new place"
About this Quote
Technology doesn’t just add conveniences; it redraws the map. In Shoshana Zuboff’s hands, “Technology makes the world a new place” reads less like a sunny tagline than a warning label. Her work on the digital economy and “surveillance capitalism” treats technology as an institutional force: it reorganizes what counts as knowledge, who gets to see whom, and how power quietly changes hands. The “new place” isn’t a metaphorical makeover. It’s a shift in the rules of reality.
The line works because it’s disarmingly plain. No villain named, no gadget singled out. That vagueness is strategic: it nudges the reader away from arguing about the latest app and toward confronting systemic change. “Makes” is doing heavy lifting, too. It implies agency and inevitability, the way climate reshapes a coastline. Technology doesn’t merely reflect society; it manufactures the conditions under which society operates.
Subtext: if the world is new, the old moral and legal frameworks may be obsolete on arrival. Zuboff’s larger context is the normalization of extraction: behavior turned into data, data turned into prediction, prediction turned into control. In that “new place,” privacy becomes less a right than a premium feature, and autonomy gets negotiated in the fine print.
As an educator-intellectual, Zuboff is also indicting our complacency. The sentence dares you to ask: new for whom, and at what cost? Because a world remade by technology can feel like progress while quietly functioning as a regime change.
The line works because it’s disarmingly plain. No villain named, no gadget singled out. That vagueness is strategic: it nudges the reader away from arguing about the latest app and toward confronting systemic change. “Makes” is doing heavy lifting, too. It implies agency and inevitability, the way climate reshapes a coastline. Technology doesn’t merely reflect society; it manufactures the conditions under which society operates.
Subtext: if the world is new, the old moral and legal frameworks may be obsolete on arrival. Zuboff’s larger context is the normalization of extraction: behavior turned into data, data turned into prediction, prediction turned into control. In that “new place,” privacy becomes less a right than a premium feature, and autonomy gets negotiated in the fine print.
As an educator-intellectual, Zuboff is also indicting our complacency. The sentence dares you to ask: new for whom, and at what cost? Because a world remade by technology can feel like progress while quietly functioning as a regime change.
Quote Details
| Topic | Technology |
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