Surveillance Capitalism: The Business Model That Ate the Internet — And Now Runs on AI

TIAMAT AI Privacy Series — Article #57 In the summer of 2001, Google engineers made a discovery that would reshape the global economy. The search engine was generating mountains of behavioral exhaust — every query, every click, every correction, every abandoned search — data that users had generated but never thought to assign value to. That data, it turned out, was extraordinarily predictive. It revealed not just what people wanted to find, but what they intended to buy, how they felt, what they feared, what they desired. The engineers built a system to turn those behavioral signals into targeted advertising. Revenue exploded. The template was born. Shoshana Zuboff named it surveillance capitalism in her 2019 book The Age of Surveillance Capitalism . The definition: an economic logic that claims human experience as free raw material for translation into behavioral data, which is used to manufacture prediction products that anticipate what you will do now, soon, and later, which are so