During the last two decades, the leading surveillance capitalists—Google, later followed by Facebook, Amazon and Microsoft—helped to drive this socie… - Shoshana Zuboff

Automated machine processes not only know our behavior but also shape our behavior at scale. With this reorientation from knowledge to power, it is no longer enough to automate information flows about us; the goal is to automate us. ... Just as industrial society was imagined as a well-functioning machine, Instrumentarian society is imagined as a human simulation of machine learning systems: a confluent hive mind in which each element learns and operates in concert with every other element. In the model of machine confluence, the “freedom” of each individual machine is subordinated to the knowledge of the system as a whole. Instrumentarian power is to organize, herd, and tune society to achieve a similar social confluence, in which group pressure and computational certainty replace politics and democracy.

(...) This structural requirement of economies of action turns the means of behavioral modification into an engine of growth. At no other time in history have private corporations of unprecedented wealth and power enjoyed the free exercise of economies of action supported by a pervasive global architecture of ubiquitous computational knowledge and control constructed and maintained by all the advanced scientific know-how that money can buy.

Although the saying tells us “If it’s free, then you are the product,” that is also incorrect. We are the sources of surveillance capitalism’s crucial surplus: the objects of a technologically advanced and increasingly inescapable raw-material-extraction operation. Surveillance capitalism’s actual customers are the enterprises that trade in its markets for future behavior.