"Surveillance capitalism was invented by Google more than a decade ago when it discovered that the “data exhaust” clogging its servers could be combined with analytics to produce predictions of user behavior. At that time, the key action of interest was whether a user might click on an ad. The young company’s ability to commandeer its data surplus into click-through prognostications became the basis for an unusually lucrative sales process known as ad targeting. In 2008, when Facebook faced a financial crisis, Zuckerberg hired Google executive Sheryl Sandberg to port over this scheme. [...] Facebook and other surveillance capitalists don’t want to harm you, but they gladly extract data from your pain. They don’t care if you’re happy, though they’re determined to fabricate the lucrative predictions that spring from your joy. It doesn’t matter what you do, as long as you do it in ways that they can transmute into profit. Once you understand this, it’s not hard to see that every Facebook action that triggers outrage is simply a predictable consequence of this economic perversion’s basic mechanisms."