We worry about companies that amass our personal data, and we wonder why they should profit. “Who owns the data?” we ask. But every discussion of data protection or data ownership omits the most important question of all: why is our experience rendered as behavioral data in the first place? It has been far too easy to overlook this important step in the chain of events that produces behavioral surplus. This chapter and the next draw our attention to the gap between experience and data, as well as to the specific operations that target this gap on a mission to transform the one into the other. I call these operations rendition. We have seen that the dispossession of human experience is the original sin of surveillance capitalism, but this dispossession is not mere abstraction. Rendition describes the concrete operational practices through which dispossession is accomplished, as human experience is claimed as raw material for datafication and all that follows, from manufacturing to sales. A focus on these intermediate practices illustrates that the apparatus of ubiquity is not a passive one-way mirror. Rather, it actively creates its own stores of knowledge through rendition.

Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Cap…, loc. 731