Surveillance capitalism’s victims can organize resistance because they retain voice

Evidence

Surely the Age of Surveillance Capitalism will meet the same fate as it teaches us how we do not want to live. It instructs us in the irreplaceable value of our greatest moral and political achievements by threatening to destroy them. It reminds us that shared trust is the only real protection from uncertainty. It demonstrates that power untamed by democracy can only lead to exile and despair. Friedman’s cycle of public opinion and durable law now reverts to us: it is up to us to use our knowledge, to regain our bearings, to stir others to do the same, and to found a new beginning. In the conquest of nature, industrial capitalism’s victims were mute. Those who would try to conquer human nature will find their intended victims full of voice, ready to name danger and defeat it. — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 1660

Categorization

• SEED: Contrast the ‘mute victims of industrial capitalism’ with the ‘voiced victims’ of surveillance capitalism as an essay angle on why resistance to extraction is more plausible today than in the Gilded Age.
• QUESTION: Is the premise that industrial capitalism’s victims were ‘mute’ historically defensible, given labor organizing and Luddite resistance?