Continuous world-ordering is now a corporate and state power goal

Evidence

Through these various steps, the capacity to order the social world continuously and with maximal efficiency has become, for the first time, a goal for corporate power and state power. Our computers and phones, and even our bodies if they carry trackable devices, become targets of this new form of power. … Two possibilities result that, before digital connection, were literally beyond the imagining of corporations or states. The first is to annex every point in space and every layer of life process to forms of tracking and control. After all, everything is in principle now connected. The second is to transform and influence behavior at every point so that this apparently shocking annexation of life to power comes to seem a natural feature of the social domain. Far from being imposed from above, this double transformation, like industrial capitalism in Marx’s understanding, makes sense only as a deeply social transformation in which members of contemporary societies have agency, even if not much power. — Nick Couldry & Ulises A. Mejias, The Costs of Connection, 119

Categorization

• XREF: Directly parallels Foucault’s notion of power operating through normalization and the discipline-through-freedom paradox; connects to how the reader’s surveillance-school critiques frame consent-based regime authority. — connects to: Data colonialism is jointly driven by corporate and state power — Nick Couldry & Ulises A. Mejias, The Costs of Connection: How Data Is…, 162; Modern state power diffuses control through continuous measured mechanisms rather than personal command; Data colonialism is backed by both the US and China as a global order — Nick Couldry & Ulises A. Mejias, The Costs of Connection: How Data Is…, 573 (+1 more)

Broader Connections

• Data colonialism is jointly driven by corporate and state power #expands (0.90) — Nick Couldry & Ulises A. Mejias, The Costs of Connection, 162
• Data colonialism is backed by both the US and China as a global order #exemplifies (0.85) — Nick Couldry & Ulises A. Mejias, The Costs of Connection, 573
• Modern state power diffuses control through continuous measured mechanisms rather than personal command #corroborates (0.80)
• Corporate power lets private groups make binding decisions with continuing effect #corroborates (0.75) — Henry M. Hart, Jr. and Albert M. Sacks, The Legal Process, 4445