How to Destroy Surveillance Capitalism (2020) is a polemical nonfiction work originally serialized on Medium's OneZero publication before appearing in paperback. It is Doctorow's most direct engagement with the "surveillance capitalism" framework developed by Shoshana Zuboff in The Age of Surveillance Capitalism (2019), and it constitutes a substantial intellectual disagreement with that framework even as it shares its concern about platform power.
The Zuboff Critique
Doctorow's central argument is that Zuboff's surveillance capitalism thesis locates the wrong mechanism of harm. Zuboff argues that the tech industry's fundamental business model — harvesting behavioral data to train predictive models that manipulate human behavior on behalf of advertisers — represents a historically novel form of domination, in which human experience itself becomes the raw material of capital. The claim is that targeted advertising works, works at scale, and works by altering the psychological substrate of human decision-making in ways users cannot perceive or resist.
Doctorow challenges this on both empirical and structural grounds. On the empirical side, he argues that the evidence for surveillance advertising's actual effectiveness is far weaker than the industry claims — that the apparent correlation between targeted ads and consumer behavior is largely a function of targeting people who were already likely to buy, not of genuine psychological manipulation. The ad industry, he suggests, sells a story of mind-control capability that exceeds its actual capability.
The structural critique is more important: even if surveillance advertising were as effective as Zuboff claims, focusing on the manipulation mechanism misidentifies the problem. The actual harm of platform power is not that Facebook can manipulate your purchasing decisions; it is that Facebook has no competition, so you cannot leave even if you want to. The harm is monopoly, not mind control.
The Monopoly Argument
The book's affirmative argument is that the correct framework for understanding and addressing platform harms is antitrust, not a new regulatory category designed around behavioral manipulation. Platforms are dangerous because they are dominant — because chokepoint-capitalism gives them the power to extract value from users, advertisers, and third-party developers without facing competitive pressure to behave otherwise. The solution is to break that dominance through antitrust enforcement, interoperability-mandates, and adversarial-interoperability rights that allow competitors to plug into dominant platforms without permission.
This argument connects directly to the adversarial-interoperability concept Doctorow was developing in parallel blog work (later systematized in the-internet-con). The claim is that historical technology markets featured robust competitive dynamics precisely because interoperability was assumed — new entrants could build on established platforms without permission. The loss of this norm, through legal restrictions on reverse engineering and API access, is what allowed platforms to become monopolies.
Bridge Position in Doctorow's Intellectual Development
The work occupies a critical bridge position between information-doesnt-want-to-be-free (2014), which diagnosed platform extraction in publishing and media, and chokepoint-capitalism-book (2022), which provided the full systematic economic account. How to Destroy Surveillance Capitalism is where Doctorow explicitly frames platform power as primarily a monopoly problem — a framing that then structures everything that follows.
The engagement with Zuboff is also a marker of Doctorow's growing engagement with academic and policy literature on platform power, a tendency that deepens in chokepoint-capitalism-book through the collaboration with rebecca-giblin. The book anticipates the arguments of lina-khan, matt-stoller, and the broader New Brandeis antitrust revival while applying them specifically to the surveillance advertising context.
Significance for the Enshittification Framework
Several concepts that would crystallize as enshittification appear here in preliminary form. The argument that platforms systematically degrade their quality for users once they have captured sufficient market share — because they face no competitive exit threat — is the structural core of what Doctorow would later name enshittification. The book is thus both a response to Zuboff and an early draft of the framework that would make Doctorow's most significant intellectual contribution to public debate in the 2020s.