In this pursuit, we are necessarily involved in citing specific actors, products, and techniques, knowing that the details of persons and companies are constantly churning. Firms will be bought and sold, fail or succeed; people will come and go. Specific technologies, products, and techniques will be abandoned, refined, and surpassed. When they fall, new ones will take their place, as long as surveillance capitalism is allowed to flourish. Velocity and churn have been critical to surveillance capitalism’s success, and we cannot allow the constant movement to inhibit our determination to grasp the “laws of motion” that command this roiling landscape. It is the pattern and its purpose that we want to grasp.

Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Cap…, loc. 757