(...) This structural requirement of economies of action turns the means of behavioral modification into an engine of growth. At no other time in his… - Shoshana Zuboff

(...) Stalin took the floor for a toast as the room fell silent. “Our tanks are worthless if the souls who must steer them are made of clay. This is why I say: The production of souls is more important than that of tanks.… Man is reshaped by life itself, and those of you here must assist in reshaping his soul. That is what is important, the production of human souls. And that is why I raise my glass to you, writers, to the engineers of the soul.”6 The authors assembled around Stalin that evening raised their glasses to his toast, persuaded perhaps by memories of less adaptive colleagues already exiled or executed (...)

During the last two decades, the leading surveillance capitalists—Google, later followed by Facebook, Amazon and Microsoft—helped to drive this societal transformation while simultaneously ensuring their ascendance to the pinnacle of the epistemic hierarchy. They operated in the shadows to amass huge knowledge monopolies by taking without asking, a maneuver that every child recognizes as theft. Surveillance capitalism begins by unilaterally staking a claim to private human experience as free raw material for translation into behavioral data. Our lives are rendered as data flows….

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.