"What do you people want?"
Imagine a restaurant which studied Big Data to work out what its customers wanted.
None of that old-fashioned inefficient handing out menus and taking down orders. These people are all meeting for lunch. They all drank coffee and 68% ate cornflakes last time they sat down to eat. Scrap the menu. Bring out coffee and cornflakes.
Recently, I bought a chair from a certain well-known online store. If I had bought every chair I've been offered, by email, since buying the chair I wanted - I would have enough now to fill an auditorium.
Surveillance capitalism fails at answering the obvious question. What do I want? I have a chair. It's a chair that I might use to sit down and eat.
What else do you think I might need in my dining space?
"I know! Another chair!" says the algorithm.