In a move of such audacity that it bears comparison to the enclosure of the commons or colonial conquests, the tech giants unilaterally declared that these previously untapped resources were theirs for the taking, and brushed aside every objection.

And in seeking to survive commercially beyond their initial goals, these companies realised they were sitting on a new kind of asset: our “behavioural surplus”, the totality of information about our every thought, word and deed, which could be traded for profit in new markets based on predicting our every need – or producing it. Setting out merely to connect us, Facebook found itself in possession of our deepest secrets. Originally intent on organising all human knowledge, Google ended up controlling all access to it we do the searching, and are searched in turn. While insisting their technology is too complex to be legislated, companies spend billions lobbying against oversight

The litany of appropriated experiences is repeated so often and so extensively that we become numb, forgetting that this is not some dystopian imagining of the future, but the present. How far and where your morning run takes you, the conditions of your commute, the contents of your text messages, the words you speak in your own home and your actions beneath all-seeing cameras, the contents of your shopping basket, your impulse purchases, your speculative searches and choices of dates and mates – all recorded, rendered as data, processed, analysed, bought, bundled and resold like sub-prime mortgages. News updates ping your phone, with your daily decision whether to click on them or not carefully monitored, and parameters adjusted accordingly. The smart thermostat in your bedroom, sensing your motion, turns on the hot water and reports your movements to a central database. T he alarm beside your bed rings, triggered by an event in your calendar.

The age of surveillance