Covid-19 and Surveillance Capitalism

This paper, relying on the main analytical concepts of the author Shoshana Zuboff, will deal with a theoretical analysis of the relationship between the phenomenon of the process of total digitalization of social life in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic and the modern phenomenon of surveillance capitalism. Surveillance capitalism, in the last thirty years with the help of technologically generated transformations of social life, has become the leading biopolitical tool for profiling the collective and individual to fully economize and control every social possibility of public and private action. In the context of the process of total digitalization of social life and the digital transformation of society, the COVID-19 pandemic served as a Trojan horse to facilitate and quantitatively increase the possibility of greater expansion of the mechanisms of surveillance capitalism given. Pandemic reality led to the fact that forced form of connecting the individual and collective spheres becomes a digital and connective form whose necessary condition is a constant online connection to virtual technological tools that allow increased control over society in the data sphere that we announce by entering the digital sphere. This theoretical work aims to examine the level of increased control of systemic surveillance capitalism through the contingent events of pandemic reality that served as a justification and legitimation of the compulsion to implement online connection with the environment, thus leading to easier access to individual and social data and the possibility of more adequate profiling for biopolitical engineering and control of society.