Surveillance capitalism’s architecture is made by humans and can be unmade democratically

Evidence

In the assertion of a right to be forgotten, the complexity of human existence, with its thousand million shades of gray, was pitted against surveillance capitalism’s economic imperatives that produced the relentless drive to extract and retain information. It was there, in Spain, that the right to the future tense was on the move, insisting that the operations of surveillance capitalism and its digital architecture are not, never were, and never would be inevitable. Instead, the opposition asserted that even Google’s capitalism was made by humans to be unmade and remade by democratic processes, not commercial decree. Google’s was not to be the last word on the human or the digital future. — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 181

Categorization

• DEEPTHINKING: This frames the entire thesis of the book in one move: that surveillance capitalism presents itself as inevitable but is a human construction subject to democratic remaking. It is the normative spine of the whole work.
• QUESTION: Worth chasing: what mechanisms of democratic remaking beyond the ‘right to be forgotten’ does Zuboff (and others) propose or document?
• XREF: Connects to critiques of technological determinism (e.g., Langdon Winner’s ‘Do Artifacts Have Politics?’) and to scholarly work on the social construction of technology. — connects to: Surveillance capitalism functions as a profoundly antidemocratic social force — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 1643; Surveillance capitalism’s inevitabilist ideology presents its power as natural like a glacier — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 1258; Surveillance capitalism structurally requires lawless extraction and must defeat democracy to survive — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 338

Broader Connections

• Surveillance capitalism functions as a profoundly antidemocratic social force #complicates (0.75) — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 1643
• Surveillance capitalism’s inevitabilist ideology presents its power as natural like a glacier #complicates (0.70) — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 1258