Targeted advertising was foundational to surveillance capitalism’s origins

Evidence

Google’s invention of targeted advertising paved the way to financial success, but it also laid the cornerstone of a more far-reaching development: the discovery and elaboration of surveillance capitalism. Its business is characterized as an advertising model, and much has been written about Google’s automated auction methods and other aspects of its inventions in the field of online advertising. With so much verbiage, these developments are both over-described and under-theorized. Our aim in this chapter and those that follow in Part I is to reveal the “laws of motion” that drive surveillance competition, and in order to do this we begin by looking freshly at the point of origin, when the foundational mechanisms of surveillance capitalism were first discovered. — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 202

Categorization

• DEFINE: Sets up ‘laws of motion’ and ‘point of origin’ as analytic frame for the chapter.
• XREF: connects to: Marketers pioneered tracking through cookies before social media platforms refined it — Nick Couldry & Ulises A. Mejias, The Costs of Connection: How Data Is…, 114; Surveillance-based mobile advertising made Facebook among the largest companies worldwide — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 503; Surveillance capitalism expanded from online advertising to offline bodily and financial life — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 42 (+3 more)