Wildlife telemetry techniques were repurposed as surveillance capitalism’s framework.

Evidence

It was a time when scientists reckoned with the obstinacy of free-roaming animals and concluded that surveillance was the necessary price of knowledge. Locking these creatures in a zoo would only eliminate the very behavior that scientists wanted to study, but how were they to be surveilled? The solutions once concocted by scholars of elk herds, sea turtles, and geese have been refurbished by surveillance capitalists and presented as an inevitable feature of twenty-first-century life on Earth. All that has changed is that now we are the animals. — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 634

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the book’s earlier threads on behavioral surplus and how surveillance capitalism frames itself as inevitable; also parallels the zoo-vs-wild distinction against the stated reading purpose of defining the digital economy.
• SEED: An essay angle: ‘we are the animals’ — how scientific wildlife-tracking ethics (minimally invasive, for the animal’s benefit) inverted when applied to human beings.