My relationship with social media? It’s complicated, to say the least.

I have a Facebook account, but I rarely use it. I need consistent mental health breaks from Twitter, though I criticize myself for not being one of those writers who seems to thrive on the platform. I have an on-again-off-again relationship with Instagram, downloading the app when I’m lonely and bored, and deleting it after spending hours scrolling through pictures of perfectly plated pastas.

But like many people who are now isolated at home, anxious, afraid and far from family and friends, I’m spending a lot of time on social media these days. I’m messaging friends on Instagram and WhatsApp and streaming live videos. I’m grateful for these tools but I squirm every time I see the subtle but conspicuous “From Facebook” at the bottom of the login pages. I wonder how much valuable information tech companies are mining about our psyches right now. What it means to them that usage is up and we’re relying on them more than ever.

For a couple months before the pandemic started, I was catching up on a term that had been circulating for some time: “surveillance capitalism.” Popularized by a Harvard researcher, Shoshana Zuboff, it’s the idea that the current — and perhaps final — frontier of capitalism is human experience and, in particular, predictions of human experience. It’s that technology pioneered by the likes of Google and Facebook that surveils us, often without our consent, to generate invaluable information about what we will do today, tomorrow and in the future. And it’s a lucrative model that’s making a select group of people — mostly men — rich; men who understand the tools of the trade and how they’re being used.

It is, in essence, the business of collecting, buying and selling our personal data, and it’s producing what Ms. Zuboff calls “epistemic inequality”: a dangerous situation whereby the invaluable knowledge and information these technologies collect about us is held by the few, who also just happen to be the increasingly powerful.