Sublime

This new market form declares that serving the genuine needs of people is less lucrative, and therefore less important, than selling predictions of their behavior. Google discovered that we are less valuable than others’ bets on our future behavior. This changed everything.

III. Surveillance Capital and the Two Texts

instrumentarianism, defined as the instrumentation and instrumentalization of behavior for the purposes of modification, prediction, monetization, and control.

That the “personality” insights themselves are banal should not distract us from the fact that the volume and depth of the new surplus supplies enabled by these extraction operations are unprecedented; nothing like this has ever been conceivable.

Apple was among the first to experience explosive commercial success by tapping into a new society of individuals and their demand for individualized consumption.

Although he does not mean to, Hilbert merely confirms the privileged position of the surveillance capitalists and the asymmetrical power that enables them to bend the division of learning to their interests.

As decision rights and self-determination become privileges of the wealthy, what will Varian offer to answer those who clamor for the same?

Google’s spectacular success in constructing the mechanisms and principles of surveillance capitalism and attracting surveillance revenues ignited competition in an escalating war of extraction.