'The goal is to automate us': welcome to the age of surveillance capitalism (www.theguardian.com)

Shoshana Zuboff’s new book, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, reframes the rise of Big Tech not as a technical inevitability but as a new capitalist regime: firms extract “behavioral surplus” from users’ online activity, feed it into “machine intelligence,” and sell the resulting prediction products on what she calls behavioural futures markets. Originating at Google around 2001 as an answer to the dot‑com bust, this model turned data exhaust into a highly profitable advertising engine (revenues surged prior to Google’s 2004 IPO) and was propagated across the industry—most notably via executives who moved between platforms—so that surveillance capitalism now underpins everything from ads to smart devices, insurance, healthcare and finance. Technically, Zuboff emphasizes a stack: pervasive sensing and storage, methods to capture or infer private signals (even when users withheld consent), large‑scale analytics and opaque algorithms that translate experience into predictive models. The result is an unprecedented asymmetry of knowledge—watchers versus watched—with profound democratic implications and near‑zero regulatory oversight. Because the capture and sale of behavioral predictions is existential to these business models, she argues self‑regulation won’t work; addressing the problem requires systemic policy and legal intervention to rebalance power, protect privacy, and rein in the commodification of human experience.