Past policy tools fail against surveillance capitalism because they target obsolete problems

Evidence

The point for us is that every successful vaccine begins with a close understanding of the enemy disease. The mental models, vocabularies, and tools distilled from past catastrophes obstruct progress. We smell smoke and rush to close doors to rooms that are already fated to vanish. The result is like hurling snowballs at a smooth marble wall only to watch them slide down its facade, leaving nothing but a wet smear: a fine paid here, an operational detour there, a new encryption package there. — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 193

Categorization

• XREF: The vaccine/HIV analogy for naming a new adversary parallels Zuboff’s framing that old regulatory language cannot grasp surveillance capitalism — similar to how other analysts argue novel technologies require novel legal categories rather than analogical extension. — connects to: Belated 2000 privacy legislation could have made surveillance capitalism largely illegal. — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 363; Section 230’s rationale fails because today’s intermediaries are surveillance capitalists — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 358