Google’s invention of targeted advertising paved the way to financial success, but it also laid the cornerstone of a more far-reaching development: the discovery and elaboration of surveillance capitalism. Its business is characterized as an advertising model, and much has been written about Google’s automated auction methods and other aspects of its inventions in the field of online advertising. With so much verbiage, these developments are both over-described and under-theorized. Our aim in this chapter and those that follow in Part I is to reveal the "laws of motion" that drive surveillance competition, and in order to do this we begin by looking freshly at the point of origin, when the foundational mechanisms of surveillance capitalism were first discovered.

Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Cap…, loc. 202