Surveillance Capitalism: Origins, History, Consequences

It was like walking among matrices of a great digital computer, the zeroes and ones twinned above, hanging like balanced mobiles right and left, ahead, thick, maybe endless. —Oedipa Maas

In recent years, there has been a growing fascination with a concept known as “surveillance capitalism”. (Figure 1). The term itself is not new. It had been floating around for about a decade (Zuboff 2019, 2022; Foster and McChesney 2014; Mosco 2014; Lauer and Lipartito 2021, pp. 1–26).1 But it gained significant traction thanks to Shoshana Zuboff’s 2019 bestseller, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism. Different thinkers have their own takes on what the term means, but there is a common thread that runs through all of them: the rise of new digital technologies that do not just serve us—they observe us, and they find ways to manipulate us into surrendering our information. These technologies collect vast amounts of data about our behaviors, preferences, and interactions, which are then sold, packaged, and repurposed for profit.2

What makes surveillance capitalism uniquely capitalist is the way private entities—primarily large corporations in the tech, information, and social media sectors—systematically dispossess us of our personal data and claim ownership over it. As we navigate the digital realms of the internet—and increasingly, the physical world through the spread of facial recognition and other tracking technologies—fragments of our lives are captured, analyzed, and commodified.4 While we might think of all this information as producing transparency (as we will see some economists do), transparency is a two-way glass where each party sees the other equally. Surveillance calls attention to inequality, whereby one side sees but the other side does not.

This data collection is not incidental but vast, creating the conditions for powerful algorithms and machine learning systems to predict our behaviors—what we might buy, where we will go, who we may vote for. These predictions are not just valuable to the companies that generate them, like Amazon and Facebook, who use them to target us with personalized marketing. Their real value lies in their sale to third parties—companies and organizations that participate in data auctions to target us with ads, political messages, financial products, and anything else that can be bought and sold.

The genius—and the danger—of this system lies in its market logic. The more our actual behavior conforms to these data-driven predictions, the more valuable those data become. This creates a feedback loop where the system refines itself, making us more visible and predictable, which further enhances its economic power. Zuboff sounds the alarm about the broader consequences of this process as well. She warns of the erosion of personal choice and free will. As our lives become more algorithmically managed, our autonomy begins to diminish.

While the ethical implications of this loss of agency are significant, I want to focus on its economic consequences: the possible loss of creativity, innovation, and entrepreneurship. In a system where behavior is managed and predictions dominate, the space for creative disruption shrinks. When everything is designed to conform to data-driven expectations, the opportunity for unexpected breakthroughs—the kind that drive real innovation—narrows. Surveillance capitalism does not just control individuals; it may also stifle the very entrepreneurial spirit and creative innovation that has traditionally driven economic growth.