Surveillance capitalism’s inevitabilist ideology presents its power as natural like a glacier
Evidence
Astonishment is a necessary alarm. We need it, but it should not leave us frozen in disbelief. The steady drumbeat of Big Other’s manifest destiny, its breathtaking velocities, and the obscurity of its aims and purpose are intended to disarm, disorient, and bewilder. Inevitabilist ideology works to equate surveillance capitalism and its instrumentarian power with nature: not a human construction but something more like a river or a glacier, a thing that can only be joined or endured. All the more reason to ask: Might the banalities of today’s declarations (“instruct the vehicular monitoring system not to allow the car to be started”) also reveal themselves in the fullness of time as the seeds of our century’s greatest nightmare? What of the authors of the instrumentarian project? How will we appraise the smiling, robust faces of the tech titans when we revisit those images in the glossy pixels of some twenty-first-century version of Look? — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 1258
Categorization
- DEFINE: Defines ‘inevitabilist ideology’ as the rhetorical strategy equating surveillance capitalism with unchangeable nature.
- XREF: The banal administrative language (‘instruct the vehicular monitoring system’) echoes Hannah Arendt’s banality of evil thesis in Eichmann in Jerusalem. — connects to: Inevitabilism is a rhetorical cover for contingent capitalist choices driving surveillance. — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 709; Believing surveillance capitalism is inevitable is itself a form of capitulation — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 1652; Utopian techno rhetoric is strategic propaganda that legitimates surveillance capitalism’s drive toward totality — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 1284 (+5 more)
- DEEPTHINKING: The core provocation — that today’s mundane system commands are the functional seeds of totalitarian dehumanization — is the chapter’s central unsettling claim, worth sitting with.
Broader Connections
- Believing surveillance capitalism is inevitable is itself a form of capitulation
#expands(0.80) — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 1652