Surveillance capitalism’s design aim is the extinction of autonomous selfhood

Evidence

Unlike Milgram, we face an intolerable situation. Like the gamblers in their machine wombs, we are meant to fuse with the system and play to extinction: not the extinction of our funds but rather the extinction of our selves. Extinction is a design feature formalized in the conditions of no exit. The aim of the tuners is to contain us within “the power of immediate circumstances” as we are compelled by the “logic of social relations” in the hive to bow to social pressure exerted in calculated patterns that exploit our natural empathy. Continuously tightening feedback loops cut off the means of exit, creating impossible levels of anxiety that further drive the loops toward confluence. What is to be killed here is the inner impulse toward autonomy and the arduous, exciting elaboration of the autonomous self as a source of moral judgment and authority capable of asking for a subway seat or standing against rogue power. — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 1512

That our walls are dense and deep is of no importance now because the boundaries that define the very experience of home are to be erased. There can be no corners in which to curl up and taste the pleasures of solitary inwardness. There can be no secret hiding places because there can be no secrets. Big Other swallows refuge whole, along with the categories of understanding that originate in its elemental oppositions: house and universe, depth and immensity. Those ageless polarities in which we discover and elaborate our sense of self are casually eviscerated as immensity installs itself in my refrigerator, the world chatters in my toothbrush, elsewhere stands watch over my bloodstream, and the garden breeze stirs the chimes draped from the willow tree only to be broadcast across the planet. The locks? They have vanished. The doors? They are open. — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 1526

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to my The Age of Surveillance Capitalism reading purpose — the ‘no exit’ logic is the payoff of behavioral surplus as an architecture. — connects to: Surveillance harms by invading the self’s space on another’s behalf. — Nick Couldry & Ulises A. Mejias, The Costs of Connection: How Data Is…, 471; Autonomy is threatened by capitalism’s mutual implication of life and technology — Nick Couldry & Ulises A. Mejias, The Costs of Connection: How Data Is…, 566; Automated surveillance threatens the open-ended self-transformative capacity that defines selfhood — Nick Couldry & Ulises A. Mejias, The Costs of Connection: How Data Is…, 489 (+8 more)
• DEEPTHINKING: Connects the erasure of domestic secrecy directly to the collapse of the cognitive categories through which self is formed—a dense claim that privacy loss is not just informational but ontological.
• SHARE: The image of a garden breeze broadcast across the planet—perfect illustration for someone working on smart-home privacy.
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 1512; Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 1526