Democracy in America and Britain grew from capital-labor reciprocities surveillance capitalism abandons

Evidence

The absence of organic reciprocities with people as either sources of consumers or employees is a matter of exceptional importance in light of the historical relationship between market capitalism and democracy. In fact, the origins of democracy in both America and Britain have been traced to these very reciprocities. In America the violation of consumer reciprocities awakened an unstoppable march toward liberty as economic power translated into political power. A half century later in Britain, a grudging, practical, self-interested respect for the necessary interdependence of capital and labor translated into new patterns of political power, expressed in the gradual expansion of the franchise and the nonviolent shift to more-inclusive democratic institutions. Even a brief glance at these world-altering histories can help us grasp the degree to which surveillance capitalism diverges from capitalism’s past. — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 1594

Categorization

• XREF: Links to the double-movement framing from Polanyi invoked throughout this book and to economic-history accounts of democratization. — connects to: Surveillance capital’s tuning society replaces governance and politics with social pressure — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 1496; Postwar social democracy rested on perpetual growth between capital and labor — Arthur Borriello and Anton Jäger, The Populist Moment: The Left After the…, 127
• SEED: Angle: the structural difference between surveillance capitalism and historical capitalism as a problem of democratic legitimacy, pitched as economic history meets current digital economy.
• DEEPTHINKING: Dense causal claim worth sitting with: democracy itself is traced to reciprocities that the surveillance economy by design eliminates, tying political legitimacy to a specific economic structure.

Broader Connections

• Surveillance capital’s tuning society replaces governance and politics with social pressure #expands (0.75) — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 1496