2019

The US-American scholar Shoshana Zuboff is Professor Emerita of Business Administration at Harvard Business School in Cambridge, Massachusetts. She later largely shelved her lectureship as she did not support the school’s economic relationship to the digital economy. In countless commentaries and speeches, Shoshana Zuboff has been a regular presence in Germany as well, highlighting the effects of “Big Data” and calling for a “response to the arrogance of Silicon Valley.” She sharply criticizes the collection of personal data, in particular by global internet corporations like Google and Facebook, and describes their business models as “surveillance capitalism” which, in her view, “destroys the inner nature of man.”

“Following the inventor of the World Wide Web, the founder of social media and the founder of the world’s largest e-commerce company, in 2019 Axel Springer is honoring Shoshana Zuboff with the Axel Springer Award for her courage and forthright stance in analyzing the problematic sides of the digital economy as well as her tireless efforts to remind us of our responsibility to be conscious of the personal and societal impacts of a data-driven economy on the public. Her innovative research on the dangers of ‘surveillance capitalism’ have changed the way we look at digital market behavior and has had a critical impact on the cultural acceptance of Big Data.”