Corporate data-as-asset rhetoric reframes untapped user data as a trillion-dollar revenue source

Evidence

It concluded that “companies taking advantage of their data have the potential to raise an additional $1.6 trillion in revenue over companies that don’t,” and Nadella was determined to make landfall on the far shores of this rich new space. Microsoft would reap the advantages of its own data, and it would specialize in “empowering” its clients to do the same. Nadella composed a blog to signal the new direction, writing, “The opportunity we have in this new world is to find a way of catalyzing this data exhaust from ubiquitous computing and converting it into fuel for ambient intelligence.” As a video outlining the new “data vision” explains, “Data that was once untapped is now an asset.” — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 506

Categorization

• DEFINE: Captures the precise corporate rhetoric—‘data exhaust’ converted into ‘fuel for ambient intelligence’—that defines the surveillance-capitalism value proposition in its own words.
• XREF: The ‘data exhaust turned into fuel’ phrasing parallels the behavioral surplus/reinvention cycle established in Zuboff’s earlier chapters on Google. — connects to: Data analytics progressed from describing internal data to prescribing every process and behavior — Nick Couldry & Ulises A. Mejias, The Costs of Connection: How Data Is…, 79; Sharing’s semantic unboundedness masks the corporate capture of data — Nick Couldry & Ulises A. Mejias, The Costs of Connection: How Data Is…, 514; Data-driven governance converts democratic dialogue into a corporate-owned probability spectrum — Nick Couldry & Ulises A. Mejias, The Costs of Connection: How Data Is…, 645 (+7 more)

Broader Connections

• Platform profit comes from commodifying user data by-products rather than selling ads #expands (0.80) — Jürgen Habermas, A New Structural Transformation of the…, 40
• Industry discourse framed data exhaust as a benign by-product recycled to improve services #responds-to (0.75) — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 1873