surveillance capitalism
ser-VAY-luns KAP-ih-tul-iz-um
sərˈveɪləns ˈkæpɪtəlɪzəmListen
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Dictionary meaning
the economic logic, identified and named by Shoshana Zuboff in her 2019 book The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, by which digital corporations extract human behavioural data as a raw material, process it through machine intelligence to produce predictive products about users' future behaviour, and sell those predictions to advertisers and other clients seeking to influence behaviour at scale; surveillance capitalism claims human experience as a free input to production, creating an asymmetry of knowledge — corporations know far more about individuals than individuals know about corporations — that Zuboff argues constitutes a new form of power threatening both individual autonomy and democratic governance; it differs from industrial capitalism in that its primary raw material is not physical labour but behavioural data generated as a by-product of digital activity
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