A 'long read' article, the full title of which is: 'The goal is to automate us': welcome to the age of surveillance capitalism. The book's title is: The Age of Surveillance Capital.

The article acts as an introduction and has a ten question Q&A with the author Shoshana Zuboff, of Harvard Business School. It is a large tome (600 pgs), so it will take a long time to become a best seller.

Here is a helpful passage that explains:
The name Zuboff has given to the new variant is “surveillance capitalism”. It works by providing free services that billions of people cheerfully use, enabling the providers of those services to monitor the behaviour of those users in astonishing detail – often without their explicit consent. “Surveillance capitalism,” she writes, “unilaterally claims human experience as free raw material for translation into behavioural data. Although some of these data are applied to service improvement, the rest are declared as a proprietary behavioural surplus, fed into advanced manufacturing processes known as ‘machine intelligence’, and fabricated into prediction products that anticipate what you will do now, soon, and later. Finally, these prediction products are traded in a new kind of marketplace that I call behavioural futures markets. Surveillance capitalists have grown immensely wealthy from these trading operations, for many companies are willing to lay bets on our future behaviour.”
How about this from the author herself:
This antidemocratic and anti-egalitarian juggernaut is best described as a market-driven coup from above: an overthrow of the people concealed as the technological Trojan horse of digital technology. On the strength of its annexation of human experience, this coup achieves exclusive concentrations of knowledge and power that sustain privileged influence over the division of learning in society.
Link:https://www.theguardian.com/technolo...oogle-facebook