Auto insurers are besieged by consultants and would-be technology partners who proffer surveillance capitalistic strategies that promise a new chapter of commercial success. “Uncertainty will be strongly reduced,” intones a McKinsey report on the future of the insurance industry. “This leads to demutualization and a focus on predicting and managing individual risks rather than communities.” A report by Deloitte’s Center for Financial Services counsels “risk minimization”—a euphemism for guaranteed outcomes—through monitoring and enforcing policyholder behavior in real time, an approach called “behavioral underwriting.” “Insurers can monitor policyholder behavior directly,” Deloitte advises, by “recording the times, locations, and road conditions when they drive, whether they rapidly accelerate or drive at high or even excessive speeds, how hard they brake, as well as how rapidly they make turns and whether they use their turn signals.” Telematics produce continuous data flows, so real-time behavioral surplus can replace the traditional “proxy factors,” such as demographic information, that had previously been used to calculate risk. This means that surplus must be both plentiful (economies of scale) and varied (economies of scope) in both range and depth.

Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Cap…, loc. 666