Surveillance platforms extract behavioral data from users and sell predictions to advertisers

Evidence

The logic: Google and other surveillance platforms are sometimes described as “two-sided” or “multi-sided” markets, but the mechanisms of surveillance capitalism suggest something different. Google had discovered a way to translate its nonmarket interactions with users into surplus raw material for the fabrication of products aimed at genuine market transactions with its real customers: advertisers. The translation of behavioral surplus from outside to inside the market finally enabled Google to convert investment into revenue. The corporation thus created out of thin air and at zero marginal cost an asset class of vital raw materials derived from users’ nonmarket online behavior. At first those raw materials were simply “found,” a by-product of users’ search actions. Later those assets were hunted aggressively and procured largely through surveillance. The corporation simultaneously created a new kind of marketplace in which its proprietary “prediction products” manufactured from these raw materials could be bought and sold. — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 297

Categorization

• DEFINE: Defines the distinction between two-sided markets and surveillance capitalism’s actual mechanism: nonmarket user behavior translated into marketable prediction products.
• ADDENDUM: Could pair with ‘On Sacrifice’ or the grafting piece’s infrastructure lens, though it’s a stretch; more directly relevant to the reader’s foundational goal of defining surveillance capitalism.
• XREF: connects to: Large social platforms function as aggregators of niche tracking services — Alice E. Marwick, Status Update: Celebrity, Publicity,…, 542; Platform profits come from harvesting user attention and selling it back to advertisers — Yves Citton, The Ecology of Attention, 43; Digital platforms hijack life into data whose insights are sold back to us (+18 more)

Broader Connections

• Platforms extract behavioral surplus from human activity to predict and modify it. #corroborates (0.90) — , The Braided Reading EPUB, 809
• Surveillance capitalists deliberately conceal how their platforms monetize user behavior #expands (0.85) — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 1411
• Platform profit comes from commodifying user data by-products rather than selling ads #qualifies (0.85) — Jürgen Habermas, A New Structural Transformation of the…, 40
• Surveillance capitalism moves from predicting behavior to actively shaping it in real time #expands (0.82) — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 481
• Surveillance capitalist experiments exploit knowledge asymmetry to engineer user behavior for profit #expands (0.80) — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 934
• Surveillance capitalism’s prediction imperative modifies behavior using secret means beyond awareness. #expands (0.78) — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 612