Surveillance capitalism functions as a profoundly antidemocratic social force

Evidence

Surveillance capitalism arrived on the scene with democracy already on the ropes, its early life sheltered and nourished by neoliberalism’s claims to freedom that set it at a distance from the lives of people. Surveillance capitalists quickly learned to exploit the gathering momentum aimed at hollowing out democracy’s meaning and muscle. Despite the democratic promise of its rhetoric and capabilities, it contributed to a new Gilded Age of extreme wealth inequality, as well as to once-unimaginable new forms of economic exclusivity and new sources of social inequality that separate the tuners from the tuned. Among the many insults to democracy and democratic institutions imposed by this coup des gens, I count the unauthorized expropriation of human experience; the hijack of the division of learning in society; the structural independence from people; the stealthy imposition of the hive collective; the rise of instrumentarian power and the radical indifference that sustains its extractive logic; the construction, ownership, and operation of the means of behavior modification that is Big Other; the abrogation of the elemental right to the future tense and the elemental right to sanctuary; the degradation of the self-determining individual as the fulcrum of democratic life; and the insistence on psychic numbing as the answer to its illegitimate quid pro quo. We can now see that surveillance capitalism takes an even more expansive turn toward domination than its neoliberal source code would predict, claiming its right to freedom and knowledge, while setting its sights on a collectivist vision that claims the totality of society. Though still sounding like Hayek, and even Smith, its antidemocratic collectivist ambitions reveal it as an insatiable child devouring its aging fathers. — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 1643

Surveillance capitalism and its rapidly accumulating instrumentarian power exceed the historical norms of capitalist ambitions, claiming dominion over human, societal, and political territories that range far beyond the conventional institutional terrain of the private firm or the market. As a result, surveillance capitalism is best described as a coup from above, not an overthrow of the state but rather an overthrow of the people’s sovereignty and a prominent force in the perilous drift toward democratic deconsolidation that now threatens Western liberal democracies. — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 73

Surveillance capitalism’s successful claims to freedom and knowledge, its structural independence from people, its collectivist ambitions, and the radical indifference that is necessitated, enabled, and sustained by all three now propel us toward a society in which capitalism does not function as a means to inclusive economic or political institutions. Instead, surveillance capitalism must be reckoned as a profoundly antidemocratic social force. — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 1626

Categorization

• XREF: The catalog of democratic insults — hive collective, instrumentarian power, right to the future tense — compresses the book’s entire running argument into one summary paragraph; connects to Piketty on accumulation in the next paragraph. — connects to: Surveillance capitalism’s dangers exceed privacy and monopoly concerns — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 546; Dominance over society’s division of learning is surveillance capitalism’s new axial principle — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 566; Surveillance capitalism’s behavioral modification creates heteronomous individuals contrary to democratic ideals — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 1003 (+9 more)
• DEFINE: Crystallizes the full list of surveillance capitalism’s injuries to democracy in one place, a useful definitional reference for the framework.
• SEED: The ‘coup from above’ framing is a strong essay angle: arguing surveillance capitalism is not market capitalism’s extension but a sovereignty overthrow.
• corroborated: 3 independent passages support this claim — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 1643; Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 73; Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 1626

Broader Connections

• Surveillance capitalism is a species of power comparable in significance to totalitarianism #corroborates (0.85) — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 1699
• Surveillance capitalism constitutes a privatized market-based collectivism #corroborates (0.80) — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 1603