Who owns your data? We are used to signing the question away in unread terms of service agreements, but it has increasingly become a matter of livelihood. Shipping companies like UPS and Amazon micromanage their workers with advanced surveillance networks, while international retailers and fast-food chains now generate employee schedules with complex, data-fed efficiency algorithms. Monsanto “smart farm” technologies extract valuable insights from independent farmers en masse, and Uber drivers may even help develop their own self-driving replacements by building driving databases of unprecedented size and detail.

Capitalists have long collected profitable data from their workers without compensation, but only more recently has the proliferation of networked smart technologies — “the internet of things” — extended this surveillance beyond the workplace, adding a dimension of unwaged value-creation to our personal lives. Digital retailers profile us to give targeted recommendations; streaming services learn our tastes to predict what content we will enjoy; and fitness apps track our calories and steps to help us make “healthier” decisions. Soon, VR headsets may even be tracking minute eye movements and spontaneous retinal activity.

These technologies usually feed our personal information back to private companies, where insights about our shopping habits, interests, and bodily functions reap huge profits. Big data can’t exist without our input, and the analytics market wouldn’t have grown to a $130 billion dollar industry without wide-scale cooperation. Just as passive data collection adds new layers of invisible labor to the “smart farmer’s” workday, it increasingly transforms our leisure time into productive work.