https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Surveillance_capitalismSurveillance capitalism is a term first introduced by John Bellamy Foster and Robert McChesney in Monthly Review in 2014 and later popularized by academic Shoshana Zuboff that denotes a new genus of capitalism that monetizes data acquired through surveillance.[1][2][3][4]
According to Zuboff, surveillance capitalism emerged due to the "coupling of the vast powers of the digital with the radical indifference and intrinsic narcissism of the financial capitalism and its neoliberal vision that have dominated commerce for at least three decades, especially in the Anglo economies"[3] and depends on the global architecture of computer mediation which produces a distributed and largely uncontested new expression of power she calls 'Big Other'.[5]
She states it was first discovered and consolidated at Google, being to surveillance capitalism what Ford and General Motors were to mass-production and managerial capitalism a century ago, and later adopted by Facebook and others[3] and that it uses illegible mechanisms of extraction, commodification, and control of behavior to produce new markets of behavioral prediction and modification.[5]
Zuboff states that "the online world, which used to be kind of our world, is now where capitalism is developing in new ways"[6] by data extraction rather than the production of new goods, thus generating intense concentrations of power over extraction and threatening core values such as freedom[7] and privacy.[3]
I ran into this term the other day while looking into privacy online. Have you ever heard of it? It really seems to touch on a lot of our fears about being exposed online, and what may be happening behind the curtain.