The Harvard Crimson

The Carr Center for Human Rights Policy at the Harvard Kennedy School held the inaugural event on Friday for its new initiative, “Surveillance Capitalism or Democracy?” — a subsidiary of its Technology and Human Rights program.

The event, entitled “A Dialogue with the World: Surveillance Capitalism or Democracy? The Fight for the Soul of Our Information Civilization,” featured 2021 Nobel Peace Prize recipient Maria Ressa, Harvard Business School professor Shoshana Zuboff, European Commissioner for Competition Margrethe Vestager, and UK House of Lords Baroness Beeban Kidron.

The initiative follows Zuboff’s coining of the term “surveillance capitalism” — or the system that “owns and operates our global information and communication spaces” — in her writings since 2014, including her 2019 book “The Age of Surveillance Capitlism.”