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by xkde 2415 days ago
I’m having a hard time trying to decide if people are trying to dirty capitalism with “surveillance” or surveillance with capitalism. Seems like the latter has become a dirty word over night for no apparent reason.
2 comments

Adjectives modify nouns.

In the case, it's a bit tricky, but "surveillance" is acting as an adjective, more specifically a noun adjunct

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noun_adjunct

Except the adjective in this case is sufficient as a noun on its own. Unless you want to bring capitalism in for ulterior motives.
Surveillance capitalism simply describes the business model of spying on users to build hidden psychological / behavioural / demographic profiles which are then sold through opaque backroom market mechanisms, all with zero regard to consent.

You can have a positive view of each separate word (depending on context) and the term still works perfectly in describing the business model society is beginning to reject, through mechanisms like the GDPR and CCPA.