Best Books on Surveillance & Data: Where to Start

For most of modern history, surveillance meant someone watching you: the guard in the tower, the informant, the camera on the corner. Michel Foucault’s Discipline and Punish (1975) made Jeremy Bentham’s panopticon the emblem of that kind of power. Today the watching is mostly done by data systems we invite in. Phones, apps, smart speakers and loyalty cards record what we do so that platforms can predict, and nudge, what we’ll do next.

Shoshana Zuboff’s The Age of Surveillance Capitalism is the best-known book on this shift, and it’s already ranked in our philosophy of technology list. This ranking goes further. It asks what data does to desire, identity and freedom, and it weighs each book’s conceptual originality, evidence, and usefulness for thinking about the present.

Where to start

Start with Bernard Harcourt’s Exposed for the theory and John Cheney-Lippold’s We Are Data for the identity question. Then read Colin Koopman’s How We Became Our Data for the history and Carissa Véliz’s Privacy Is Power for what to do about it.

1. Bernard E. Harcourt, Exposed: Desire and Disobedience in the Digital Age (2015)

The most philosophically interesting book on digital surveillance. Harcourt argues in Exposed that we no longer live in Foucault’s disciplinary society but in an “expository society,” where we expose ourselves willingly because doing so is pleasurable. Power works through our desire to share, click and be seen, not against it. It’s the best bridge between surveillance studies and psychoanalysis.

2. John Cheney-Lippold, We Are Data: Algorithms and the Making of Our Digital Selves (2017)

The book on algorithmic identity. We Are Data shows how platforms assign us “measurable types,” such as a gender, an age, a political leaning or a level of risk, inferred from our behavior and constantly revised. These categories needn’t match who we think we are to have real effects. It’s short, lucid and unsettling.

3. Nick Couldry and Ulises A. Mejias, The Costs of Connection (2019)

The book that coined a framework. The Costs of Connection argues that the appropriation of human life through data is a new form of colonialism, “data colonialism,” which turns social life into raw material just as historical colonialism appropriated land and labor. The comparison is provocative, but the authors make it carefully.

4. Colin Koopman, How We Became Our Data: A Genealogy of the Informational Person (2019)

The historical depth the debate needs. Koopman shows in How We Became Our Data that the “informational person” didn’t begin with Facebook. It was built over the twentieth century through birth certificates, psychological personality testing and the data behind redlining. His name for the politics that results is “infopolitics.” It’s a Foucauldian genealogy done right.

5. Wendy Hui Kyong Chun, Discriminating Data (2021)

The most original account of algorithmic bias. In Discriminating Data, Chun argues that network science is built on assumptions such as homophily, the idea that like attracts like, which turn segregation into a design principle. The models don’t just reflect divisions; they reproduce them. It’s dense, but it changes how you see recommendation engines.

6. Carissa Véliz, Privacy Is Power (2020)

The clearest philosophical case for privacy. Véliz, an Oxford philosopher, argues in Privacy Is Power that privacy is a collective good, not merely a personal preference, because data about you exposes others too. She makes concrete proposals, including an end to the trade in personal data. It’s the most practical book here.

7. Frank Pasquale, The Black Box Society (2015)

The legal scholar’s view. The Black Box Society examines the secret algorithms that rank our reputations, search results and creditworthiness, and argues that the asymmetry is itself the problem: they know everything about us, and we know almost nothing about them.

8. Ulises A. Mejias and Nick Couldry, Data Grab: The New Colonialism of Big Tech and How to Fight Back (2024)

The popular sequel to The Costs of Connection. Data Grab updates the data-colonialism argument for a general audience and adds a playbook for resistance, from regulation to worker organizing. It’s the most recent book on the list and the most activist.

9. Louise Amoore, Cloud Ethics: Algorithms and the Attributes of Ourselves and Others (2020)

A political geographer’s account of how machine learning makes decisions about borders, policing and security. Cloud Ethics argues that algorithms don’t simply follow rules; they generate their own “attributes” of people. Rather than demanding perfect transparency, Amoore asks how we can hold such systems to account.

10. David Lyon, The Culture of Surveillance: Watching as a Way of Life (2018)

The field’s senior sociologist on how surveillance became something we do, not just something done to us. The Culture of Surveillance maps the “imaginaries” and everyday practices of watching and being watched. It’s the best overview of the field.

Honorable mentions

Platform Capitalism by Nick Srnicek (2016): the business models behind the data economy.
Filterworld by Kyle Chayka (2024): what recommendation algorithms do to culture.
The Stack by Benjamin H. Bratton (2016): planetary computation as a new geopolitical architecture.

The philosophers’ view: Han, Agamben, Žižek and Sloterdijk

Byung-Chul Han’s The Transparency Society and Psychopolitics make the same move as Harcourt: digital power seduces rather than forbids, and we exploit ourselves while believing we’re free. Giorgio Agamben has warned for two decades that biometric identification turns citizens into suspects, and his What Is an Apparatus? is the short theory behind that warning. Slavoj Žižek’s Like a Thief in Broad Daylight (2018) worries about a digital control so pervasive that we stop noticing it. Peter Sloterdijk’s Foams describes modern society as a mass of small, co-isolated bubbles, an uncanny forecast of the feed.

One to watch: Rafael Gallardo

The books above describe surveillance as an infrastructure. Rafael Gallardo, writing at The Rhizome Times, describes it as a kind of architecture we live inside. In the relaunch post of his “Rhizomatic Walks”, he argues: “Architecture becomes an invisible entity, and we become entrapped in this architectural reality—one that’s formulated by information itself.” In “Boundaries and Being” he follows the consequences for identity, arguing that algorithmic “unilateral communication” pushes us into ever narrower niches. That’s close to Cheney-Lippold’s “measurable types,” but read through Žižek’s theory of ideology and Mark Fisher’s capitalist realism. Gallardo calls the whole field “the reality of the virtual.” His first book, Indoctrination Guide, is out December 25, 2026; you can preorder the digital edition now. Follow him at The Rhizome Times.

Worth subscribing

Henry Farrell, Programmable Mutter: a Johns Hopkins political scientist on technology and politics in an interdependent world, from AI metaphors to the political economy of tech; see “We’re stuck in Philip K. Dick’s imagined universe”. 30K+ subscribers on Substack.
Kyle Chayka, Kyle Chayka Industries: weekly essays on how technology reshapes how we create and consume culture, from the author of Filterworld; try “Everything on the internet is a ‘show’”. 10K+ subscribers on Substack.

Conclusion

Start with Harcourt for the theory and Cheney-Lippold for the identity question. Read Koopman for the history and Véliz for what to do. The lesson of the whole shelf is the same: the problem isn’t only that we’re watched, but that the watching now helps decide who we are.

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