The concept of surveillance capitalism, as described by Shoshana Zuboff, is driven by a profit-making incentive, and arose as advertising companies, led by Google's AdWords, saw the possibilities of using personal data to target consumers more precisely.
The economic pressures of capitalism are driving the intensification of online connection and monitoring, with spaces of social life opening up to saturation by corporate actors, directed at making profits and/or regulating behavior.
[4] Shoshana Zuboff writes that "analysing massive data sets began as a way to reduce uncertainty by discovering the probabilities of future patterns in the behavior of people and systems".
[1][11][12] This mutation resulted in both companies collecting very large numbers of data points about their users, with the core purpose of making a profit.
[13][14] Oliver Stone, creator of the film Snowden, pointed to the location-based game Pokémon Go as the "latest sign of the emerging phenomenon and demonstration of surveillance capitalism".
This data can then be analysed and commodified by companies such as Google (which significantly invested in the game's development) to improve the effectiveness of targeted advertisement.
[17][better source needed] This may resemble a corporatocracy, and Joseph Turow writes that "the centrality of corporate power is a direct reality at the very heart of the digital age".
[9] Zuboff emphasizes that behavioral changes enabled by artificial intelligence have become aligned with the financial goals of American internet companies such as Google, Facebook, and Amazon.
[9] Zuboff warns that principles of self-determination might be forfeited due to "ignorance, learned helplessness, inattention, inconvenience, habituation, or drift" and states that "we tend to rely on mental models, vocabularies, and tools distilled from past catastrophes," referring to the twentieth century's totalitarian nightmares or the monopolistic predations of Gilded Age capitalism, with countermeasures that have been developed to fight those earlier threats not being sufficient or even appropriate to meet the novel challenges.
[34] Bruce Sterling's 2014 lecture at Strelka Institute "The epic struggle of the internet of things"[35] explained how consumer products could become surveillance objects that track people's everyday life.
[35][36][37] In 2015, Tega Brain and Surya Mattu's satirical artwork Unfit Bits encourages users to subvert fitness data collected by Fitbits.
[40][41] The 2019 documentary film The Great Hack tells the story of how a company named Cambridge Analytica used Facebook to manipulate the 2016 U.S. presidential election.
Extensive profiling of users and news feeds that are ordered by black box algorithms were presented as the main source of the problem, which is also mentioned in Zuboff's book.