Surveillance is certainly part of this, again as we have emphasized, but not sufficiently to brand today's capitalism as surveillance capitalism. For, within the longer history of colonialism and capitalism, surveillance has often been the accompaniment to the direct appropriation of laboring bodies for value (think of the slave plantation). What is new today is not so much surveillance but rather the networks of social relations in which vastly extended modes of appropriating human life through data work to order economic and social life as a whole.

Nick Couldry & Ulises A. Mejias, The Costs of Connection, loc. 151