As Varian writes, "Because transactions are now computer-mediated we can observe behavior that was previously unobservable and write contracts on it. This enables transactions that were simply not feasible before." Varian's "we" refers to those with privileged access to the shadow text into which behavioral data flow. Our behavior, once unobservable, is declared as free for the taking, theirs to own, and theirs to decide how to use and how to profit from. This includes the production of "new contractual forms" that compel us in ways that would not have been possible but for surveillance capitalism's original declarations of dispossession.

Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Cap…, loc. 680