Rapacious behavior scraping
Surveillance capitalism is upon us and will soon explode to create a new gilded age of wealth disparity in the same way mass production did in the early 20th Century. Author and Harvard professor, Shoshana Zuboff, is pulling back the curtain on the nearly indecipherable priesthood of data scientists at Google, Facebook, Microsoft and Amazon.
“Google discovered that we are less valuable than others bets on our future behavior. This changed everything.”
— Shoshana Zuboff
Throughout the 20th century, industrial capitalism laid waste to our natural resources through monopoly and extraction/abuse of ‘the commons.’ Now, we are seeing that surveillance capitalism is doing the same to human natural resources. Scraping and extracting what the capitalists euphemistically call “behavioral exhaust” to fuel this new market.
Google’s strategy is to sell predictions of what we each will “feel, think and do - now, soon and later.” They and the other miner/traders in behavioral futures are going all-in to protect these newfound stores of human raw materials as if their future depends on it. It does.
Given the continued growth of surveillance capitalism, what does this mean for businesses and organizations? How will consumers react to the steadily increasing privacy invasions? How will government leaders react here and around the world? What other marketplaces will leverage predictive behavioral data to unlock new opportunities?