Google’s founders saw human experience as free raw material for surveillance capitalism.

Evidence

Page grasped that human experience could be Google’s virgin wood, that it could be extracted at no extra cost online and at very low cost out in the real world, where “sensors are really cheap.” Once extracted, it is rendered as behavioral data, producing a surplus that forms the basis of a wholly new class of market exchange. Surveillance capitalism originates in this act of digital dispossession, brought to life by the impatience of over-accumulated investment and two entrepreneurs who wanted to join the system. — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 315

Categorization

• DEFINE: Concrete origin story anchoring the definition of digital dispossession as the founding act of surveillance capitalism.
• XREF: Links to the classic fiction-commodity theory of land and labor, and to the ‘survival imperative’ framing of surveillance capitalists. — connects to: Google institutionalized surveillance capitalism by simply declaring its right to take experience as data — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 1078; Google’s founders frame total surveillance as the logical path to a perfected society — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 1274; Google’s founders conceived its product as capturing all personal life data — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 310 (+3 more)

Broader Connections

• Surveillance capitalism threatens human sovereignty over life and authorship of experience #expands (0.90) — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 1650
• Data exploitation resembles capitalism’s free ride on uncommodified life, not factory labor #corroborates (0.85) — Nick Couldry & Ulises A. Mejias, The Costs of Connection, 326