Within a few years, the company realized that its search results were not just data points about what people happened to be trying to find at any given time but early indications about what people wanted—information about their desires, which Google had access to before anyone else. Google pioneered what Harvard professor Shoshana Zuboff calls surveillance capitalism.16 Companies that operate according to this model translate private human experience into behavioral data that can then be used to engineer their desires, or at least to exploit them for profit.17
