The first wave of prediction products enabled targeted online advertising. These products depended upon surplus derived at scale from the internet. I have summarized the competitive forces that drive the need for surplus at scale as the “extraction imperative.” Competition for surveillance revenues eventually reached a point at which the volume of surplus became a necessary but insufficient condition for success. The next threshold was defined by the quality of prediction products. In the race for higher degrees of certainty, it became clear that the best predictions would have to approximate observation. The prediction imperative is the expression of these competitive forces.

Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Cap…, loc. 621