Crises recast surveillance practices from legislative targets into mission-critical necessities.

Evidence

The elective affinity between public intelligence agencies and the fledgling surveillance capitalist Google blossomed in the heat of emergency to produce a unique historical deformity: surveillance exceptionalism. The 9/11 attacks transformed the government’s interest in Google, as practices that just hours earlier were careening toward legislative action were quickly recast as mission-critical necessities. Both institutions craved certainty and were determined to fulfill that craving in their respective domains at any price. These elective affinities sustained surveillance exceptionalism and contributed to the fertile habitat in which the surveillance capitalism mutation would be nurtured to prosperity. — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 370

Categorization

• DEFINE: Introduces and defines ‘surveillance exceptionalism’ as the concept that state and corporate surveillance mutually reinforce each other in emergencies.
• XREF: Connects to the book’s own earlier framing of behavioral surplus and to Giorgio Agamben’s ‘state of exception’ literature on emergency suspending normal law. — connects to: Crisis techniques turn manageable crises into calculated instruments of power; Institutionalization made surveillance capitalism’s practices appear necessary and inevitable — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 388

Broader Connections

• Crisis techniques turn manageable crises into calculated instruments of power #expands (0.82)
• Institutionalization made surveillance capitalism’s practices appear necessary and inevitable #corroborates (0.80) — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 388