Users are raw material suppliers whose behavior yields predictive products indifferent to their fate

Evidence

This helps to explain why it is inaccurate to think of Google’s users as its customers: there is no economic exchange, no price, and no profit. Nor do users function in the role of workers. When a capitalist hires workers and provides them with wages and means of production, the products that they produce belong to the capitalist to sell at a profit. Not so here. Users are not paid for their labor, nor do they operate the means of production, as we’ll discuss in more depth later in this chapter. Finally, people often say that the user is the “product.” This is also misleading, and it is a point that we will revisit more than once. For now let’s say that users are not products, but rather we are the sources of raw-material supply. As we shall see, surveillance capitalism’s unusual products manage to be derived from our behavior while remaining indifferent to our behavior. Its products are about predicting us, without actually caring what we do or what is done to us. — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 216

Categorization

• DEFINE: Core definitional move: users are neither customers, workers, nor products, but sources of raw-material supply for surveillance capitalism.
• XREF: Connects to the reader’s work on behavioral surplus and prediction markets as the defining account of the digital economy. — connects to: Behavioral prediction markets treat people as raw material and targets, never as participants — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 1029; Users are not products but abandoned carcasses stripped of surplus — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 1199; Social media free products are extraction lures, and users are raw-material sources, not products — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 43 (+5 more)

Broader Connections

• Platform profit comes from commodifying user data by-products rather than selling ads #expands (0.85) — Jürgen Habermas, A New Structural Transformation of the…, 40
• Digital assistants convert inner life into calculable behavioral surplus for others’ profit #exemplifies (0.85) — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 796
• People are reduced to objects whether addressed as employees or consumers #expands (0.82) — Theodor W. Adorno, Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 113
• Audience exploitation arises from users becoming commodities, not from literal work #corroborates (0.80) — Nick Couldry & Ulises A. Mejias, The Costs of Connection, 327
• Normal human activities that feel unproductive become exploited as data #expands (0.78) — Nick Couldry & Ulises A. Mejias, The Costs of Connection, 675