These methodologies for predicting and shaping our behavior have grown more sophisticated over the first two decades of the twenty-­first century. Collection and analysis of big data about people is a well-­established industry. It includes the companies collecting data (miners), those trading it (brokers) and those using it to generate advertising messages (marketers), often with overlap between all three. It can be hard to obtain reliable estimates of the size of the industry, given its complexity, but one study says that by 2012 it was worth around $156 billion in the United States and accounted for 675,000 jobs. It has undoubtedly grown since then. Like slum landlords who rent out dilapidated apartments, or greedy hotshot developers who take advantage of legal loopholes to build luxury condos, companies that trade in personal data represent the sleazy side of how digital technology is impacting the real estate of our minds. This industry uses the faux luxuries of choice and convenience to entice us to part with our data, but often what they are really selling is overpriced and dodgy.

The most valuable consumer platforms have both the capacity to collect highly valuable personal data and the opportunity to use it to market to users at the most lucrative moments of their daily lives. These are the places in which the invisible hand of what I call technology capitalism is at work—between data miners and advertisers, with data on users as the commodity being traded.

This is Freud’s pleasure principle writ large—a social experience that is centered around pursuing endless saccharine indulgences with the promise of avoiding reality.

There is much still to be won and lost in the battle for our online autonomy in the future. As the next generation of web technology improves the integration of all our digital activities, allowing machines to organize even more of our lives, others will continue to learn more about us than we even know ourselves. In this context, focusing on our power over this process as consumers is a mistake: the power being exercised over us is precisely based on our being socialized as consumers. This prepares us to accept a city where every park is paved over to build freeways and every sports field and roller-­skating rink is demolished to build a shopping mall. Such a city would not be a functional, let alone enjoyable, place to live. But it would be a place where data traders and retailers made a lot of money.