Google already knew the potential value to be gained from analysing the digital exhaust of our web searches but had rejected using it on the grounds that it would taint the value of their search results.
Surveillance capitalism was born at a moment of financial emergency: after the dot.com crash, when Google’s premier investors were questioning whether they would ever see a return. It is this market that drives the precision targeting of digital advertising today but will eventually underpin all forms of advertising and promotion. These products are traded, claiming to predict what we will do now… soon … and later. It is fed into the surveillance capitalism supply chain and converted into ‘Prediction Products’. Surveillance capitalism seizes ownership of our private human experience as a free raw material to be turned into behavioural data. Like traditional capitalism, it takes things things hitherto outside the market, commoditises and trades them in the marketplace. “Surveillance Capitalism”, says Zuboff, “concerns the science of prediction”.
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