A few choice snippets:<p>> [a world in which] technology users are neither customers, employees, nor products. Instead they are the raw material for new procedures of manufacturing and sales that define an entirely new economic order: a surveillance economy.<p>> Surveillance capitalism was invented at Google between 2000 and 2001 as a response to the financial emergency during the dot-com bust.<p>> This is an economic logic that was so successful at Google that within just a few years, it became the default model throughout the tech sector and then spread through the normal economy and has become the dominant economic logic in our time.<p>> Between 2001, when this logic first started being systematically applied, and 2004, when Google went public (the first time we got to see any of their numbers) their revenue increased by 3,590%. That exponential increase represents what I call the surveillance dividend.<p>> At that point, they had cracked the code and many companies found a path to monetization. Now everybody from your TV manufacturer to Ford Motor Company started to say “to heck with the product, we want the data.” Everyone in every sector is chasing the surveillance dividend.<p>> ..if Google had a business, it would be personal information. People are going to produce so much data. There will be cheap cameras and sensors everywhere. There will be so much data about people’s lives that all of human experience will be searchable and indexable.<p>> [Larry Page] had the vision that personal information was the game. Surveillance capitalism is an economic logic founded on the unilateral, secret theft of private experience as a limitless source of free raw material, and that free raw material becomes the zero-cost asset [meaning that, after set-up costs, it is free to produce]. It can be translated into behavioral data. That behavioral data is now claimed as proprietary and it’s gathered into new complex supply chain ecosystems.<p>> Everything feeds the supply chain. Not only what you do online, but everything on your phone, all the apps on your phone, and as Page predicted, all the cameras and sensors are gathering data. All of behavioral data is now claimed as proprietary and flows into complex ecosystems before being conveyed to surveillance capitalism’s computational factories, called artificial intelligence. The [output] is computational products that predict human behavior that are sold in markets, just like we have markets for pork belly futures or oil futures.