Inevitabilism is a rhetorical cover for contingent capitalist choices driving surveillance.
Evidence
Inevitabilism enshrines the apparatus of ubiquity as progress but conceals the realpolitik of surveillance capitalism at work behind the scenes. We know that there can be alternative paths to a robust information capitalism that produces genuine solutions for a third modernity. We have seen that surveillance capitalism was discovered and honed in history, handcrafted by men and women to serve the interests of impatient capital. It is this same logic that now demands ubiquity, ready to colonize technical developments for the sake of its imperatives and growth. Inevitabilism operates in the service of these imperatives as it distracts attention from the ambitions of a rising economic order and the competitive anxieties that drive the surveillance project toward certainty, thus necessitating its ever-more-voracious claims on our behavior. — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 709
Categorization
- DEFINE: Defines ‘inevitabilism’ as the ideology that survival surveillance capitalism is unavoidable when it is actually historically contingent.
- XREF: connects to: Inevitability rhetoric is a fraud that disables resistance to power — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 704; Surveillance capitalism’s inevitabilist ideology presents its power as natural like a glacier — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 1258; Utopian techno rhetoric is strategic propaganda that legitimates surveillance capitalism’s drive toward totality — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 1284
Broader Connections
- Surveillance capitalism’s inevitabilist ideology presents its power as natural like a glacier
#corroborates(0.92) — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 1258 - Utopian techno rhetoric is strategic propaganda that legitimates surveillance capitalism’s drive toward totality
#corroborates(0.85) — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 1284