Behavioral futures markets are only incidentally about advertising

Evidence

Surveillance capitalism’s profits derive primarily from these behavioral futures markets. Although advertisers were the dominant players in the early history of this new kind of marketplace, there is no reason why such markets are limited to this group. The new prediction systems are only incidentally about ads, in the same way that Ford’s new system of mass production was only incidentally about automobiles. In both cases the systems can be applied to many other domains. — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 305

Categorization

• DEFINE: Defines behavioral futures markets as the profit engine — a contested, framing term central to the reader’s stated purpose.
• XREF: The Ford analogy parallels platform-versus-product thinking; connects to broader capitalism discussion of prediction as generalized infrastructure. — connects to: Behavioral surplus flows back to shape driver behavior and feed prediction futures markets — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 679; Sponsored locations transform game play into behavioral futures markets for real-world customers. — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 992; Behavioral prediction markets treat people as raw material and targets, never as participants — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 1029
• SEED: Angle: ‘advertising was the beginning, not the end’ — how a mass-production-analogy reveals the real ambition of data extraction markets.