The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism

by Naomi Klein

In the nineties, tech companies endlessly trumpeted the wonders of the borderless world and the power of information technology to topple authoritarian regimes and bring down walls. Today, inside the disaster capitalism complex, the tools of the information revolution have been flipped to serve the opposite purpose. In the process, cell phones and Web surfing have been turned into powerful tools of mass state surveillance by increasingly authoritarian regimes, with the full cooperation of privatized phone companies and search engines, whether it’s Yahoo collaborating with the Chinese government to pinpoint the location of dissidents or AT&T helping the U.S. National Security Agency to wiretap its customers without a warrant (a practice the Bush administration claims it has discontinued). The dismantling of borders, the great symbol and promise of globalization, has been replaced with the exploding industry of border surveillance, from optical scanning and biometric IDs to the planned high-tech fence on the border between Mexico and the U.S., worth up to $2.5 billion for Boeing and a consortium of other companies.