Surveillance capital firms cycle through incursion, habituation, retreat, and recamouflaged pursuit.
Evidence
The dispossession cycle: First at Google and later at Facebook and other firms, surveillance capitalist leaders mastered the rhythms and stages of dispossession. Audacious incursions are pursued until resistance is met, followed by a range of tactics from elaborate public relations gambits to legal combat, all designed to buy time for gradual habituation to once-outrageous facts. A third stage features public demonstrations of adaptability and even retreat, while in the final stage resources are redirected to achieve the same objectives camouflaged by new rhetoric and tactics.
— Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 1081
Categorization
DEFINE: Defines dispossession as a four-stage cycle rather than a single act.
XREF: Connects to We (Zamyatin) and its treatment of engineered consent, and to paranoia about private power in the collection. — connects to: Surveillance firms adapt tactics to whatever resistance incursions meet — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 438; Fixating on specific firms obscures the underlying patterns of surveillance capitalism — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 757; Corporations advance surveillance incrementally and furtively rather than all at once — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 501