Institutionalization made surveillance capitalism’s practices appear necessary and inevitable

Evidence

Why is it that so many years after the events that triggered the mania for information dominance, surveillance capitalism still runs with relatively little impediment, especially in the US? The intervening years have seen the proliferation of thousands of institutional facts that normalized surveillance capitalism’s practices and made them appear necessary and inevitable: the discovery of behavioral surplus and the massive accumulations of capital and material that followed, the proliferation of devices and services, the integration of data flows, and the institutionalization of futures markets in human behavior. — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 388

Categorization

• DEFINE: Introduces the concept of ‘institutional facts’ that normalize practices — a usable definition for understanding why surveillance capitalism persists.
• XREF: connects to: Surveillance capitalism conquered through unilateral declarations, not permission seeking — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 564; Surveillance capitalism’s core activities proceed by misrepresenting extraction as something else — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 722; Google institutionalized surveillance capitalism by simply declaring its right to take experience as data — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 1078 (+7 more)

Broader Connections

• Surveillance capitalism’s inevitabilist ideology presents its power as natural like a glacier #expands (0.92) — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 1258