The Age of Surveillance Capitalism

by Shoshana Zuboff

Surveillance capitalism’s unique economic imperatives are the puppet masters that hide behind the curtain orienting the machines and summoning them to action. These imperatives, to indulge another metaphor, are like the body’s soft tissues that cannot be seen in an X-ray but do the real work of binding muscle and bone. We are not alone in falling prey to the technology illusion. It is an enduring theme of social thought, as old as the Trojan horse. Despite this, each generation stumbles into the quicksand of forgetting that technology is an expression of other interests.

In McConnell’s future there is one “seamless” surveillance empire in which the requirements of self-preservation leave no opportunity for the amenities of democracy, with its time-wasting practices of due process, evidence, warrants, and law.