The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power

These are the markets in which surveillance capitalists trade prediction products that are made using the public’s behavioral surplus data. This marketplace represents the final step in the flow of exploitation that characterizes surveillance capitalism. It is where surveillance capitalists gain exorbitant profits off of the behavioral data they have secretly gleaned from the lives of the public.

The most important element in surveillance capitalism, behavioral surplus is the raw material that surveillance capitalists require to produce profit. This behavioral data is considered surplus because it is the excess data that tech firms hold on to that is not used to improve or streamline a particular service or product. Firms feed this surplus into machine intelligence to “educate” AI on patterns of human behavior and eventually create prediction products.

Instrumentarianism is the form of power that surveillance capitalism uses to exert its control and work towards its eventual goal of a “utopia of certainty,” in which the entire world is united under a ubiquitous computer network that observes and predicts everybody’s behavior. Instrumentarian power is exerted through surveillance capitalism’s vast network of technology—the “Big Other”—that renders, analyzes, and actively intervenes in human experience. It thus targets the mind, not the body. Instrumentarianism is an unprecedented power that threatens to dominate the future and destroy democratic society.

Whereas industrial capitalism relies on the means of production, surveillance capitalism differs in that it largely relies on the means of behavioral modification. This “means” refers to the fact that under surveillance capitalism, economic, social, and political power lies with those who have the ability to collect, analyze, and modify behaviors at mass scale. This term reflects the power imbalance present in surveillance capitalism, because only a select few members of the world population own these means.

An economic philosophy that rose to prominence in the 1970s in response to the ideological battle of the Cold War, neoliberalism champions self-regulation, privatization, and individualism. Neoliberalism effectively paved the way for surveillance capitalism’s birth in the late 20th century because it stripped away numerous federal regulations over the market. This allowed tech firms to exploit their user bases in secret, away from the critical eye of the government. Many scholars argue that neoliberalism also caused socioeconomic strife through raised rents and high unemployment rates, breeding frustration and hopelessness in contemporary citizens. Surveillance capitalism exploits the public’s vulnerabilities caused by neoliberal conditions and sells products that purport to make modern life easier, when in reality, the products operate to observe and modify behaviors. Neoliberalism thus helps surveillance capitalism expand its apparatus as well.

These products are made to predict what an individual might do next and—even more insidiously—to actively intervene in one’s real-life decisions. Prediction products are designed using machine intelligence analysis of behavioral surplus data. Sold on behavioral future markets, these products make surveillance capitalists their huge amounts of profit. Prediction products are dangerous in their unprecedented foresight into people’s actions, helping the private sector exploit and profit off of the unwitting public.

Rendition encompasses the acts of dispossession through which surveillance capitalism claims human experience as the raw material that fuels its process of productivity. Zuboff notes that when surveillance capitalism uses people’s data, it achieves both definitions of the verb “render”: when experience is translated into data, it is transformed from a given source to a new one. Furthermore, when a person uses the internet, one renders their experience to surveillance capitalism—as in to surrender or hand over. These processes of rendition occur in both online and offline spaces as surveillance capitalism’s apparatus continues to grow and overtake new spaces in society.

This is the second of two texts that define surveillance capitalism’s division of knowledge. While the first text is the body of information publicly available to anybody online, the shadow text is the mass of behavioral data gleaned from the first text. Most people do not know this text exists, and only surveillance capitalists can access and utilize its behavioral surplus data for production and profit. This second, secret text is about the public, but not for the public. It maintains surveillance capitalism’s asymmetries of power and ensures that its operations remain secret, preventing any resistance to its methods of exploitation.