I recently bought the first body weight scale of my adult life. Remembering the robust and everlasting mechanical scale I spent my childhood and adolescence with, I assumed procuring such a mundane device would be anything but unspectacular. What a misconception! Once the sleek, disc-looking thing came out of the box, I realized with consternation that I inadvertently purchased a “smart” scale. Holding the ugly glass plate in one hand and the user manual with its gibberish about “tracking body composition metrics” in addition to instructing me to scan a QR code, install an app, and open an account in the other hand, I was ready to return the odious gadget and just forget about getting a scale altogether. I just wanted a damn scale! Only after spending at least half an hour on the internet before coming across a well-hidden user forum post claiming that the scale can be utilized despite my unwillingness to create an account and install an app (and providing all my information) did I grudgingly decide to keep it. Something as ostensibly trivial as a weight scale tucked away under a bathroom vanity has now been engineered into a surveillance device with an insatiable appetite for our data. Shoshana Zuboff cautions that gadgets such as the so-called Nest thermostat and its “brethren [smart] devices create immense new stores of knowledge and therefore new power,” and that what once might have originated as a common good-oriented approach to smart/ubiquitous computing with at least some guardrails in place (e.g. “Aware Home” project), has by now been taken over by unbridled market forces claiming total ownership of the extracted knowledge. While previously the raw material fueling capitalism was at least to a certain extent distant from humans, in surveillance capitalism human life experience itself has become (free!) raw material. The business model: Prediction of future human behavior, which is achieved by reaching into our most intimate spaces and mining them for free “raw material” that will be reinterpreted into behavioral data. Ultimately, “these prediction products are traded in a new kind of marketplace for behavioral predictions that [Zuboff calls] behavioral futures markets” (15). The goal is to know and influence human behavior so that it leads to profitable (and predictable) outcomes. Zuboff recognizes in this a “new species of power” that “knows and shapes human behavior toward other’s ends. Instead of an armaments and armies, it works its will through the automated medium of an increasingly ubiquitous computational architecture of ‘smart’ networked devices, things, and spaces” (16). In this set-up we are not surveillance capitalism’s customers; we are the raw material. The enterprises trading in surveillance capitalism’s markets for future behavior are the actual customers. Zuboff rightly deems surveillance capitalism as a “rogue force” that wrecks foundations crucial for the survival of a democratic society. Overall, Zuboff draws a rather bleak picture of the future. Yet, she does mention that the “overthrow of the people’s sovereignty” and the concomitant demise of the Western liberal democratic model can be reverted (28). However, since the publication of Zuboff’s book in 2019, things have only gotten worse. Just think about the signification of the smirking tech oligarchs surrounding Trump at his inauguration. How swiftly some of them adjusted their stances and consolidated behind a right-wing politician. Or Zuckerberg’s recent ramblings about the need for “masculine energy.” Think about the findings of scholars and UN investigators that Facebook contributed to genocide in Myanmar. Or DOGE’s post-puberty tech-bros who fantasize about being “disruptors” and get off from wreaking havoc in unionized workplaces and destroying people’s livelihoods. Zuboff didn’t quite foresee how much worse a situation we find ourselves in just a few years after the publication of her book.