National security demand for surveillance let Google’s practices grow unregulated

Evidence

Surveillance exceptionalism helped to shape the evolutionary course of information capitalism by creating an environment in which Google’s budding surveillance practices were coveted rather than contested. Once again, history offers us no control groups, and we cannot know with certainty whether information capitalism might have developed in a different direction had it not been for the sudden new interest in surveillance capabilities. For now, it appears that one unanticipated consequence of this public-private “elective affinity” was that the fledgling practices of surveillance capitalism were allowed to root and grow with little regulatory or legislative challenge, emboldening Google’s young leaders to insist on lawlessness as a natural right and, in ways that are even more opaque, emboldening the state to grant them that freedom. — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 384

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the reader’s material on how pre-state trade institutions arose from information gaps, and to the freedom-of-information material on how state power shapes information regimes. — connects to: Google legally framed public spaces as unauthorized surveillance territory — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 444; National security agencies have coveted private-sector surveillance capacities as seamless extensions of state power — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 381