Is Google an evil genius?

AS A CHILD, Shoshana Zuboff accompanied her grandfather as he walked through his factory, greeting workers. He was an inventor and had made his fortune creating a mechanism to release drinks from vending machines. It was a blissful time, both for her and for American business, she recalls. In the 1950s and 60s, “business had integrity. Those companies barely exist any more.”

That sense of loss clearly lies behind Ms Zuboff’s latest book, “The Age of Surveillance Capitalism”. For the work of a professor emerita at Harvard Business School, it is written with unusual outrage. Its arch-villain is Google, a company as far removed from a blue-collar production line as can be imagined. It sweeps beyond business to society at large, where it warns of an “overthrow of the people’s sovereignty” by the surveillance capitalists. Clearly the halcyon days of her youth, when America’s big business was trusted, are long gone. Her zeal recalls that of another writer yearning for a lost past; Ida Tarbell, whose journalism helped end the monopoly of John Rockefeller, the oil baron who ruined her father. But as muckraking goes, Ms Zuboff lays it on too thick.