Prolonged defiance converts violations into accepted normalcy

Evidence

Google achieved exactly what Hanke had predicted. Street View’s fundamental audacity, the unprecedented astonishing incursion that drew English villagers into the streets to block a Google camera car, enjoyed six more years of rooting in global consciousness. The corporation’s strategic discipline when it comes to stonewalling, snubbing, and exploiting democracy brought six more years of people using Street View data and six more years to build the tacit case for Google’s inevitability and our helplessness. There were six more years for this simple robbery of decision rights to shade into normalcy and even to be reckoned as “convenient,” “useful,” or “marvelous.” — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 465

Categorization

• SEED: Article angle: how ‘death by a thousand delays’ — regulatory stalling as a business strategy — converts any outrage into habit across industries beyond tech.
• DEFINE: Defines habituation as the conversion of a violation into normalcy through elapsed time and stonewalling.