Facebook’s founder frames surveillance as a redemptive global church infrastructure

Evidence

The success of this coup de gens stands as sour testimony to the thwarted needs of the second modernity, which enabled surveillance capitalism to flourish and still remains its richest vein for extraction and exploitation. In this context it is not difficult to understand why Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg offers his social network as the solution to the third modernity. He envisions a totalizing instrumentarian order—he calls it the new global “church”—that will connect the world’s people to “something greater than ourselves.” It will be Facebook, he says, that will address problems that are civilizational in scale and scope, building “the long-term infrastructure to bring humanity together” and keeping people safe with “artificial intelligence” that quickly understands “what is happening across our community.” — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 1631

Categorization

• SEED: Angle: the religious vocabulary of surveillance platforms — ‘church,’ ‘something greater than ourselves,’ redemption through AI — as a rhetorical pattern across tech leaders.
• XREF: Zuckerberg’s ‘church’ framing resonates with the reader’s article on sacrifice and sacred institutions as tools of social stabilization. — connects to: Zuckerberg frames Facebook as supplying purpose and hope to unsettled moderns — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 1282; Facebook builds fabricated social realities that normalize surveillance as interaction. — Nick Couldry & Ulises A. Mejias, The Costs of Connection: How Data Is…, 348; Surveillance replaces God’s total knowledge as an inescapable observer — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 1499 (+4 more)

Broader Connections

• Google’s founders frame total surveillance as the logical path to a perfected society #exemplifies (0.85) — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 1274
• Facebook builds fabricated social realities that normalize surveillance as interaction. #expands (0.80) — Nick Couldry & Ulises A. Mejias, The Costs of Connection, 348
• Surveillance replaces God’s total knowledge as an inescapable observer #complicates (0.75) — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 1499
• Religious practices get reframed as security threats justifying citizen surveillance #corroborates (0.70) — Saher Selod, Forever Suspect_ Racialized…, 273
• Surveillance capitalism operates through Big Other to engineer behavior rather than souls #corroborates (0.70) — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 1196
• The framing of mosques as terror nest legitimated surveillance of religious practice #corroborates (0.70) — Sahar F. Aziz, The Racial Muslim, 818