Surveillance Capitalism

A term coined by Shoshana Zuboff in her 2018 book The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power.

Surveillance capitalism treats human experience as free raw material to be extracted, processed into behavioral data, and sold as “prediction products” in behavioral futures markets. Companies like Google and Facebook pioneered this model: your attention, your clicks, your location, your relationships—all harvested and refined into predictions about what you’ll do next, what you’ll buy, who you’ll vote for.

While industrial capitalism exploited nature, surveillance capitalism exploits human nature itself.

The key insight is that this isn’t just advertising—it’s a new logic of accumulation. The goal isn’t merely to know you, but to shape you. The more precisely your behavior can be predicted, the more valuable that prediction becomes. The endpoint is not just surveillance but modification: nudging, prompting, herding human behavior at scale.

What makes it especially insidious is how it operates outside traditional capitalist critique. These companies still maximize profit and pursue growth—they just do it by claiming ownership over the intimate patterns of human life, with remarkably little legal constraint.

See also: Datagated, Personal Computing