For surveillance capitalists, this transition is not a choice. Surveillance profits awakened intense competition over the revenues that flow from new markets for future behavior. Even the most sophisticated process of converting behavioral surplus into products that accurately forecast the future is only as good as the raw material available for processing. Surveillance capitalists therefore must ask this: what forms of surplus enable the fabrication of prediction products that most reliably foretell the future? This question marks a critical turning point in the trial-and-error elaboration of surveillance capitalism. It crystallizes a second economic imperative—the prediction imperative—and reveals the intense pressure that it exerts on surveillance capitalist revenues.

Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Cap…, loc. 620