@gleick he started his career in a hedge fund. This already primed to see humanity via the distorted lens of financial data and having an "edge". Surveillance capitalism did not happen by accident, it is the programme of frontrunning and exploiting society by monitoring all its activities the way financiers could only do within the confine of financial markets.
Bezos, the Googlers, Zuckerberg etc. are evil in the deepest sense: they conceived and scaled a modern era dehumanization for profit.