Surveillance capitalism is expanding from the web into everyday life

Evidence

Google’s breakthrough crawler enabled the lightning-fast indexing of the world wide web, the apparatus of ubiquity then enabled new operations to crawl reality, and now in this third phase, distinct supply operations are required to crawl our lives. In Google Now one sees an initial foray into this new space, in which the web crawler’s ability to find information combines with new life-crawling operations intended to render, anticipate, and, as we shall see, ultimately modify your behavior. Online and offline behavioral surplus—your e-mail content, where you went this afternoon, what you said, what you did, how you felt—are combined into prediction products that can serve an emerging marketplace in which every aspect of your daily reality is up for bid. — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 806

If life is a wild horse, then the digital assistant is one more means by which that horse is to be broken by rendition. Unruly life is brought to heel, rendered as behavioral data and reimagined as a territory for browsing, searching, knowing, and modifying. Just as surveillance capitalism transformed the web into a market onslaught fueled by the capture and analysis of behavioral surplus, so everyday life is set to become a mere canvas for the explosion of a new always-on market cosmos dedicated to our behavior and from which there is no escape. — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 841

Categorization

• DEFINE: Defines ‘life-crawling’ as the third-phase supply operation that renders, anticipates, and modifies behavior.
• SEED: Article angle: ‘From web crawlers to life crawlers’ — the logic by which indexing infrastructure expands from information to embodied human experience.
• XREF: Connects to the book’s foundational distinction between means of production and means of behavioral modification, and to earlier chapters on behavioral surplus. — connects to: Surveillance capitalism converts everyday shared spaces into objects of commercial inspection — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 445; Surveillance capitalism is expanding from online ads into real-world behavioral futures markets. — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 676; Surveillance capitalists aim to capture every corner of human experience — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 756 (+2 more)
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 806; Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 841

Broader Connections

• Surveillance capitalism expanded from online advertising to offline bodily and financial life #expands (0.92) — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 42
• Surveillance capitalism feeds on the social transformations it causes #expands (0.75) — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 1104