The World Without Surveillance Capitalism: A Multi-AI Perspective

We recently landed on an interesting question while talking about The Age of Surveillance Capitalism by Shoshana Zuboff. A lot of the tools we use every day, and a lot of the problems that come with them, depend on recording almost every moment and interaction of our lives. Zuboff calls the extra data pulled from those interactions "behavioral surplus." Behavioral surplus is leftover data companies collect from how we use digital services. It is more than they need to make the product work. That extra data becomes the raw material for surveillance capitalism. We realized the big tech world would look very different if collecting that surplus had always been illegal. Many of the companies we talk about every day would look different. Some might not exist at all if they could not trade that data for free or cheap products and services. We could speculate forever about what that world would look like. Instead, we asked AI. Not just one system, but several of the most common free…