With a breathtakingly wide brush—both historical and geographical—Tim Ström paints a compelling picture of surveillance as a crucial companion of colonization, capitalism, and war in the modern world. Thankfully, he also offers clues as to how things could be otherwise.

David Lyon, Queen's University, Canada

In an important and timely intervention, Timothy Ström has crafted an invaluable conceptual roadmap for understanding the global surveillance economy. This engagingly written and elegantly conceived book locates contemporary surveillance in its broader social contexts with the goal of imagining, against all odds, how these might be different—and better.

Mark Andrejevic, Monash University

Upgrading critiques of surveillance for the twenty-first century, Tim Ström reveals its governing paradox of absolute control and utter powerlessness. Governmental and corporate surveillance technologies are locked into the logic of a system that cannot function if its bosses are not themselves completely submissive. In meticulous detail, Ström shows how the smallest engineering decision rests on histories of colonialism and perpetuates a global system of injustice and inequality and how globalization, as a system of exploitation and oppression, shapes and is shaped by the software we so often see as helpful and at worst neutral. A wake-up call for citizens, consumers, students, and activists.

Sean Cubitt, University of Melbourne