Rendition is the first operational step of surveillance capitalism’s dispossession project

Evidence

Rendition has become a surveillance capitalist project shaped by its imperatives and directed toward its objectives. In the composition of the shadow text, rendition is Step One: the concrete operationalization of the “original sin of simple robbery” that defined this market project from the start. Google rendered the Earth, its streets, and its dwelling places, bypassing our consent and defying our protests. Facebook rendered the social network and its limitless details for the sake of the company’s behavioral futures markets. Now the ubiquitous apparatus is the means to the ubiquitous rendition of human experience. We have seen the urgency with which surveillance capitalists pursue the elimination of “friction” as a critical success factor in supply operations. The prediction imperative makes boundaries and borders intolerable, and surveillance capitalists will do almost anything to eliminate them. This pursuit transforms “connection” into a commercial imperative and transforms individual autonomy into a threat to surveillance revenues. — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 754

Categorization

• DEFINE: Defines ‘rendition’ as Step One of the shadow-text composition — the concrete operationalization of surveillance capitalism’s original theft.
• BMF: The claim that the prediction imperative makes boundaries and borders intolerable, transforming individual autonomy into a threat to revenues, echoes the totalizing surveillance-citizen logic of the ‘we’ state in Yevgeny Zamyatin’s We, where private spaces and individuality are outlawed as threats to the collective’s control.
• XREF: connects to: Rendition can exist without surveillance capitalism, but never the reverse — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 735; Facial rendition is the foundational operation surveillance capitalism cannot survive without — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 789; Surveillance capitalism’s core activities proceed by misrepresenting extraction as something else — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 722 (+1 more)

Broader Connections

• Surveillance capitalism’s core activities proceed by misrepresenting extraction as something else #expands (0.85) — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 722