A form of capitalism (sometimes also known as surveillance capitalism) where the selling and exchange of data is the source of economic benefit. It is Associated with rise of Internet and Web 2.0; post 9/11.
Search
”Currently, the predominant business model for commercial search engines is advertising. The goals of the advertising business model do not always correspond to providing quality search to users."
"We believe the issue of advertising causes enough mixed incentives that it is crucial to have a competitive search engine that is transparent and in the academic realm”
(Sergey Brin & Lawrence Page, Google cofounders)
Almost ironic that they said this when writing the paper on what would become PageRank and Google Search.
Thieves of Experience: How Google and Facebook Corrupted Capitalism
”Surveillance capitalism’s real products, vaporous but immensely valuable, are predictions about our future behavior — what we’ll look at, where we’ll go, what we’ll buy, what opinions we’ll hold"
"Unlike financial derivatives, which they in some ways resemble, these new data derivatives draw their value, parasite-like, from human experience.”
Zuboff coins the term extraction imperative: To improve its predictions, it had to mine as much information as possible from web users.
The bullying style of TOS agreements also characterizes the practice, common to Google and other technology companies, of threatening users with a loss of “functionality” should they try to opt out of data sharing protocols or otherwise attempt to escape surveillance.
“If you disable this app, other apps may no longer function as intended.”