The theory and practice of dispossession were developed and refined as the company learned how to counter and transform public resistance as an essential condition for the protection and expansion of its behavioral surplus franchise. Google’s launch of Gmail on April Fool’s Day, 2004, provided an early occasion to climb this learning curve as the corporation faced down public outrage over the automated scanning of e-mail content intended as a fresh source of surplus for targeted ads. Eventually, the dispossession cycle was refined as an explicit theory of change that framed a tactical game plan, which is by now regularly evoked as the surveillance capitalist corporation’s battle-tested response to societal resistance.

Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Cap…, loc. 442