Surveillance capitalism’s new story begins with behavioral surplus discovered more or less ready-made in the online environment, when it was realized that the “data exhaust” clogging Google’s servers could be combined with its powerful analytic capabilities to produce predictions of user behavior. Those prediction products became the basis for a preternaturally lucrative sales process that ignited new markets in future behavior.

Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Cap…, loc. 1066