CONCEPT
Surveillance Capitalism
Shoshana Zuboff's 2019 term for the economic system in which firms profit by predicting and shaping behavior at scale — the commercial substrate on which contemporary AI was developed.
Surveillance capitalism is the economic order in which companies extract behavioral data from users, process it into predictive models of those users, and sell either the predictions or behavioral influence to third parties. The term and the systematic analysis come from Shoshana Zuboff's The Age of Surveillance Capitalism (2019). The argument: the contemporary AI industry is not a neutral research program but a specific business model whose incentives shape what gets built.
In The You On AI Field Guide
Every commercial language model, recommendation system, and content ranker is embedded in surveillance capitalism. The training data comes from surveillance; the economic justification for investment comes from prediction and influence; the alignment question becomes, Zuboff argues, inseparable from the question of whose interests these systems serve.
Zuboff's analysis has become increasingly applicable since 2022, as generative-AI systems have entered the same commercial context they critique. Training data for frontier models is harvested from the same substrate — user-generated content, behavioral traces, scraped records