The business model of surveillance capitalism, premised on the extraction of behavioral data and its predictive potential for profit, relies on extensive material infrastructure. Such profit is typically driven by practices such as telemetry, user tracking, data analytics, secondary data uses, increased user engagement, and AI model training, as well as large-scale data storage systems that retain personal information for sale or reuse. This paper is motivated by the question: how much of the rising carbon impact of ICT can be attributed to this material infrastructure? Such an inquiry provides a foundation for quantifying the environmental costs of surveillance capitalism by proposing a conceptual framework and research direction that link processes of surveillance with their underlying material realities. To demonstrate the applicability of this framework, we examine the proportion of network traffic caused by surveillance capitalism processes through a comparative case study of a corporate social media platform, X/formerly Twitter, and a decentralized, non-commercial alternative, Mastodon. Our findings highlight the existence of corporate overhead: excess resource consumption driven by corporate social media practices, which is used as an initial proxy for the activities of surveillance capitalism. Our findings further demonstrate how the corporate overhead of X can be used to establish a lower bound in CO2e emissions attributable to for-profit activities that do not contribute to the user experience.

翻译：监控资本主义的商业模式以提取行为数据及其盈利预测潜力为前提，依赖于庞大的物质基础设施。这种利润通常由遥测技术、用户追踪、数据分析、二次数据使用、用户参与度提升及AI模型训练等实践驱动，并依托大规模数据存储系统保留个人信息以供销售或再利用。本文的研究动机源于以下问题：信息通信技术（ICT）日益增长的碳排放中，有多少可归因于这种物质基础设施？通过提出一个概念框架和研究方向，将监控过程与其背后的物质现实联系起来，这一探讨为量化监控资本主义的环境成本奠定了基础。为展示该框架的适用性，我们通过对比企业社交媒体平台X（原Twitter）与去中心化非商业替代平台Mastodon的案例，分析由监控资本主义流程产生的网络流量比例。研究结果揭示了企业性开销的存在：企业社交媒体实践导致的额外资源消耗，这被用作监控资本主义活动的初步代理指标。此外，我们的发现进一步表明，如何利用X的企业性开销来建立因盈利活动产生的二氧化碳当量（CO2e）排放下限，此类活动并不提升用户体验。