Nature & Animals Quote by Shoshana Zuboff

Civilization, Zuboff suggests, is less a moral upgrade than a widening gap between what we do and what our bodies want to do. The line is doing quiet violence to the usual story of progress: instead of imagining refinement as “better instincts,” she frames it as separation, a kind of engineered delay between impulse and action. That distance can look like self-control, etiquette, professionalism, even “responsible” citizenship. It can also feel like alienation: a life lived at arm’s length from appetite, fear, rage, touch.

The phrasing “civilizing process” nods to Norbert Elias’s account of modernity as the internalization of restraint: shame replaces surveillance, manners replace force. Zuboff’s twist is the emphasis on the “animal body,” a reminder that the raw material never disappears; it’s managed. Her intent, especially given her work on surveillance capitalism, is to hint that modern power often operates by mediating that gap. Institutions teach you to translate impulse into acceptable behavior; platforms learn to read impulses beneath behavior and monetize the mismatch. The body becomes a data source, while conduct becomes a performance.

Subtext: the space between impulse and behavior is political terrain. It’s where authority gets installed (rules, norms, metrics), where compliance can masquerade as maturity, and where desire can be rerouted into consumption. Zuboff’s sentence works because it refuses comfort. It doesn’t romanticize the animal or sneer at civilization; it points to the cost of “being civilized” and asks who benefits when our instincts are kept at a distance and then sold back to us as choices.