Neoliberal anti-regulation ideology and the war on terror jointly sheltered surveillance capitalism from scrutiny

Evidence

3. Historical context: Surveillance capitalism found shelter in the neoliberal zeitgeist that equated government regulation of business with tyranny. This “paranoid style” favored self-management regimes that imposed few limits on corporate practices. In a parallel development, the “war on terror” shifted the government’s attention from privacy legislation to an urgent interest in the rapidly developing skills and technologies of Google and other rising surveillance capitalists. These “elective affinities” produced a trend toward surveillance exceptionalism, which further sheltered the new market form from scrutiny and nurtured its development. — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 1079

Categorization

• SEED: The ‘elective affinities’ point suggests a possible essay: why surveillance exceptionalism tracks national-security priorities, and what happens when those alignments shift.
• XREF: connects to: Walmart synthesizes nationalism, militarism, and fear-of-terror politics into consumer space — Max Haiven, Cultures of Financialization, 297; The War on Terror borrowed securitization logic from finance to manage risk — Max Haiven, Cultures of Financialization, 269; Neoliberalism supplied sheltering ideologies that surveillance capitalism exploited — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 1923 (+3 more)

Broader Connections

• Neoliberalism supplied sheltering ideologies that surveillance capitalism exploited #corroborates (0.92) — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 1923
• Surveillance capitalism thrives where individualized consumption meets a hostile neoliberal paradigm #expands (0.75) — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 96