The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power

The apparatus refers to the extensive, almost inescapable network of technology and machine intelligence that surveillance capitalism relies on to collect behavioral surplus data and actively modify real-life behaviors. Concepts such as the “smart city” and “smart home” exemplify the apparatus at work, as these areas are composed of ubiquitous networks of machine intelligence and products that observe, collect, and modify people’s behaviors. The apparatus allows for surveillance capitalism to achieve behavioral modification at a massive scale and represents how this economic form threatens the whole of society. 

These are the markets in which surveillance capitalists trade prediction products that are made using the public’s behavioral surplus data. This marketplace represents the final step in the flow of exploitation that characterizes surveillance capitalism. It is where surveillance capitalists gain exorbitant profits off of the behavioral data they have secretly gleaned from the lives of the public.

The most important element in surveillance capitalism, behavioral surplus is the raw material that surveillance capitalists require to produce profit. This behavioral data is considered surplus because it is the excess data that tech firms hold on to that is not used to improve or streamline a particular service or product. Firms feed this surplus into machine intelligence to “educate” AI on patterns of human behavior and eventually create prediction products.