The logic: Google and other surveillance platforms are sometimes described as "two-sided" or "multi-sided" markets, but the mechanisms of surveillance capitalism suggest something different. Google had discovered a way to translate its nonmarket interactions with users into surplus raw material for the fabrication of products aimed at genuine market transactions with its real customers: advertisers. The translation of behavioral surplus from outside to inside the market finally enabled Google to convert investment into revenue. The corporation thus created out of thin air and at zero marginal cost an asset class of vital raw materials derived from users' nonmarket online behavior. At first those raw materials were simply "found," a by-product of users' search actions. Later those assets were hunted aggressively and procured largely through surveillance. The corporation simultaneously created a new kind of marketplace in which its proprietary "prediction products" manufactured from these raw materials could be bought and sold.

Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Cap…, loc. 297