This argument is at odds with her general understanding of Surveillance capitalism as “accumulation of dispossession” of our behavioral surplus (Zuboff, 2019: 99). Throughout the book, she never forgets to highlight that surveillance capitalism is a whole different animal.
Zuboff, for some reason, tries to frame surveillance capitalism as 'a new species of capitalism', a dangerous one. If we have to highlight one weak point of the book, it is precisly here that we can locate it. Every society, every social relation and key societal processes are now a ' fresh terrein for rendition, calculation, modification and prediction' (Zuboff, 2019: 399). Surveillance capitalists are thus bound to strive for a total view: every little detail about humans should be scraped. The extraction imperative is driven by the desire for huge profits: the more and the better a company extracts behavioral surplus, the more profits it can make.
This imperative means that " raw material supplies must be produced at an ever-expanding scale" (Zuboff, 2019: 87). This is, according to Zuboff, the first economic imperative of Surveillance capitalism: “the extraction imperative”. In the battle for market domination and profit maximalization, surveillance capitalists are on an endless quest to acquire ever-more predictive sources of behavioral surplus. That data is partially used to improve the digital products or services but most importantly it is declared " proprietary behavioral surplus’" fed into "machine intelligence" manufacturing processes producing ‘predictions products’". These "behavioral prediction products" are sold in a new type of market: the " behavioral futures market"’(Zuboff, 2019: 8). Surveillance capitalism claims human experience as raw material for translation into behavioral data. The humans using the digital services of Google, Facebook and the likes, are not the product, as so many people by now argue, and they are certainly not the customers. They are the stuff from which surveillance capitalists scrape their ‘raw material’. Zuboff argues that Google – just like Henry Ford in the 20th century – introduces a new type or form of capitalism: surveillance capitalism. The main argument developed by Zuboff is simple, elegant and powerful. It should not only be read and discussed by a broad audience we can only hope that scholars across disciplines engage with her argument, finetune and improve it. The age of Surveillance Capitalism by Shoshana Zuboff deserves a productive public and academic debate.
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