As we saw in Chapter 1, the Aware Home project developed at Georgia Tech just a year before the invention of surveillance capitalism employed different practices that embodied very different assumptions: (1) that it must be the individual alone who decides what experience is rendered as data, (2) that the purpose of the data is to enrich the individual’s life, and (3) that the individual is the sole arbiter of how the data are shared or put to use. Nearly two decades later, the Aware Home is barely more than an archeological fragment reminding us of the road not taken toward an empowering digital future and a more-just division of learning in society. Down that road, it is the individual who knows, decides, and decides who decides: an end in herself, not a means to others’ ends. The lesson of the Aware Home is that there can be rendition without surveillance capitalism. However, the lesson of this chapter and the next is that there can be no surveillance capitalism without rendition.

Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Cap…, loc. 735