The novel critiques an economic system described as surveillance capitalism by scholar Shoshana Zuboff, a professor emerita at Harvard Business School. Zuboff’s research explores the ways technology companies profit by collecting vast amounts of user data to predict and influence behavior. She argues that “[t]he threat has shifted from a totalitarian Big Brother state to a ubiquitous digital architecture: a ‘Big Other’ operating in the interests of surveillance capital […] the crucible of an unprecedented form of power marked by extreme concentrations of knowledge and free from democratic oversight” (Zuboff, Shoshana. “The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power.” Harvard Business School, 2019). ‌Real-world corporations like Meta and Google exemplify this model, offering “free” services in exchange for the right to monetize users’ digital lives, primarily through targeted advertising.

 In A Beautifully Foolish Endeavor, the Altus Corporation embodies a more extreme version of surveillance capitalism. Altus develops the “Altus Space,” a virtual reality that directly accesses the neural network the Carls left behind and establishes its own closed economy with a cryptocurrency called AltaCoin. The company’s ultimate goal is to capture and sell human experiences, effectively commodifying consciousness. Green’s plot provides a direct commentary on the real-world attention economy, where platforms are designed to maximize user engagement to harvest more data. For instance, the “infinite scroll” feature on apps like TikTok and Instagram is engineered to hold user focus indefinitely. Writer Grant Collins links the pull of the infinite scroll feature to concepts developed by behavioral psychologist B. F. Skinner, such as operant conditioning, in which “behavior is either strengthened by reinforcement or weakened by punishment” and variable reinforcement schedules (notably exemplified by slot machines), “in which reinforcement follows a behavior intermittently, only some of the time” (Collins, Grant. “Why the Infinite Scroll is so Addictive.” Medium, 10 Dec. 2020). ‌In Green’s novel, Altus’s “server farm,” a room where hundreds of people lie in beds mining AltaCoin (266) with their minds, serves as a dystopian example of how modern tech economies can exploit human labor and attention for profit, reflecting anxieties about corporate control over an increasingly virtual human existence.