Surveillance capitalism breaks the historical link between innovation and shared prosperity

Evidence

Historically, breakthroughs in lower-cost goods and services unleashed expansions of production and employment, higher wages, and an improved standard of living for many. Varian has no such reciprocities in mind. Instead, he pokes his finger into the open wound of second-modernity insecurities and bends our pain to the objectives of the surveillance project. With Varian, the hunger for new necessities is construed as an opportunity to dispossess, even as it conveniently provides the justification for that dispossession right down to the depths. — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 803

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the recurring theme that surveillance capitalism diverges from traditional capitalism’s reciprocities — a pattern developed earlier in Zuboff’s argument. — connects to: The internet shattered capitalism’s evolutionary fitness rather than defeating or entrenching it — Yanis Varoufakis, Technofeudalism: What Killed Capitalism, 232