Does that mean little girls and boys are doing implicit labor for national intelligence agencies? Zuboff rejected that framing. “There is an important distinction to be made between labor and raw material,” she says. These children are not working. They are merely living, and their lives are being strip-mined for data, as an elephant might be harvested for its ivory.

“What are we in this equation?” Zuboff asks. “We are not the ivory. We are not what is poached. We are the carcass that is left behind.”

Read: Even bugs will be bugged

How the hell did we create this world? And what, if anything, can we do to get out of it? That’s the central question in the latest episode of Crazy/Genius, The Atlantic’s technology podcast, produced by Jesse Brenneman and Patricia Yacob. The episode kicks off Season 3: Unbreak the Internet. (Subscribe here.)

Privacy was scarcely an issue in the United States until the late 19th century, which saw an explosion in communication technology—such as the telegraph, the telephone, and cheap cameras. Instant photos and wired communications brought tech into our personal space, and rapid urbanization brought other people into our personal space. It was an age of nascent paranoia, as people feared that once-private interactions were open to nosy neighbors. Americans didn’t realize they valued privacy until modernity made it nearly impossible to be alone.

In the mid-1900s, Americans’ privacy fears shifted from the local to the national level. As the federal government marshaled technology to expand its powers, the public feared wiretapping, McCarthyism, and the atmosphere of surveillance that George Orwell described well enough to make his surname a useful adjective. Not all these fears were rational. In the 1940s, two bus riders in Washington, D.C., sued the local government for piping in Muzak on the bus’s loudspeakers, claiming that it infringed on their right to be left alone. Shockingly, the case made it all the way to the Supreme Court; less shockingly, they lost. But the lawsuit serves as a cartoonish reminder of that age’s very real anxieties: The public so feared the overreach of government that some considered soft jazz on public transit a constitutional infringement.

Read: The employer-surveillance state

In the 19th century, privacy was about protection from people. In the 20th century, it was about protection from government. In the 21st century, it’s about protection from a new class of corporate giants that Zuboff calls “surveillance capitalists.” Companies such as Google, Facebook, and Amazon have amassed combined valuations in the trillions of dollars by building empires of omniscience. These firms know our deepest fears, our best friends, and our favorite toilet paper. Armed with such godlike powers, they can … well, what can they do? We’re not exactly sure.