What is Data Capitalism?

Data Capitalism got a push as advertising realized the potential of exploiting personal data

Data capitalism also referred to as surveillance capitalism, is the unrestricted use of private human experience as a source of free data on human behavior. Personal data is viewed and conceptualized as a source of profit in this economic system. When advertising businesses realized the potential of exploiting personal data to target consumers more precisely, surveillance capitalism emerged and reached its zenith.

The development of self-optimization—the process of automatically altering network parameters to restore performance to a level that is close to ideal—as well as social and service optimization has been defined by data collection.

The ability of capitalism to regulate society and citizens' privacy has mostly been damaged by the narrowing of its role and the expansion of the percentage of social life into data gathering and data processing.

Online monitoring and the value of data have increased as a result of the ongoing economic pressures brought on by capitalism. The ultimate objective was to generate income and saturate social life. Data capitalism leads to an uneven distribution of power that is skewed toward the actors who have access to and the capacity to make sense of the information, utilizing it for better or worse.

Although this vocabulary appears to be fairly contemporary, its origins date back to the late 17th century, when England adopted the idea of "political arithmetic." a method that used math to solve social issues to comprehend daily living. The Dutch East India Company used immigrants from South East Asia during this time to translate various aspects of colonial subjects' cultures. They were putting numbers into categories that Western conquerors could use to govern the populace.

Commercial credit organizations started creating surveillance networks in the 19th century as a way to assess and keep track of the credit of American companies. This developed into complex systems of tracking people for the supply of consumer credit by the 1870s. These early instances associated the collecting of personal data with both political and financial importance.

The development of database computing has increased businesses' ability to gather and store data about individuals. In the 1950s and 1960s, the use of surveys and polls increased to help researchers, political statisticians, and marketers understand the post-war "mass society" as a consumer audience. Through the monitoring of consumer purchases with credit cards and phone calls, operations to acquire data about consumers were essentially automatic by the 1980s.

Online business brought with it a new scale and scope of tracking, which had a profound impact on data collection techniques.

To make money from the anticipated increase in Internet users, internet commerce initially concentrated on the online sale of items. However, for these dotcom enterprises, this was not originally accompanied by profitability, and their business models eventually evolved to largely depend on venture capital investment to operate. In the late 1990s, dotcoms and IT companies swept the globe, with valuations soaring more quickly than in any other sector in recent memory. However, in 2001 the dotcom businesses experienced a crisis and a lack of income.