Minds for Sale

The attention economy did not emerge from a conspiracy. It emerged from a business model. In the early 2000s, Google discovered that the vast reservoirs of behavioural data generated by its users — what people searched for, clicked on, hesitated over, and abandoned — constituted something more commercially valuable than the searches themselves. By feeding this data into predictive algorithms and selling the resulting behavioural forecasts to advertisers, Google effectively invented a new economic logic: one in which the user was not the customer but the raw material, and in which the platform's fundamental product was not a service but a prediction of human behaviour. Harvard Business School professor emerita Shoshana Zuboff named this logic surveillance capitalism — "as significant a threat to human nature in the 21st century as industrial capitalism was to the natural world in the 19th and 20th."