Surveillance capitalism threatens the inward capacities that sustain social bonds

Evidence

The greatest danger is that we come to feel at home in glass life or in the prospect of hiding from it. Both alternatives rob us of the life-sustaining inwardness, born in sanctuary, that finally distinguishes us from the machines. This is the well from which we draw the capacities to promise and to love, without which both the private bonds of intimacy and the public bonds of society wither and die. If we do not alter this course now, we leave a monumental work for the generations that follow us. Industrial capitalism commandeered nature only to saddle the coming generations with the burden of a burning planet. Will we add to this burden with surveillance capitalism’s invasion and conquest of human nature? Will we stand by as it subtly imposes the life of the hive while demanding the forfeit of sanctuary and the right to the future tense for the sake of its wealth and power? — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 1566

Finally, I consider surveillance capitalism’s operations as a challenge to the elemental right to the future tense, which accounts for the individual’s ability to imagine, intend, promise, and construct a future. It is an essential condition of free will and, more poignantly, of the inner resources from which we draw the will to will. I ask and answer the question How did they get away with it? — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 70

Categorization

• XREF: Direct parallel to Hannah Arendt on the public/private distinction and the conditions of promising and action; also resonates with Zuboff’s earlier ‘right to the future tense’ motif discussed throughout this book. — 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; Surveillance capitalism’s dangers exceed privacy and monopoly concerns — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 546; Information civilization built on surveillance capitalism threatens to cost us our humanity. — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 1102 (+8 more)
• DEFINE: Introduces the book’s core concept of ‘the right to the future tense’ — the capacity to intend and promise as the ground of free will — a contested idea central to the surveillance-capitalism framework.
• DEEPTHINKING: The notion that behavioral prediction undermines not just privacy but the very inner resource ‘from which we draw the will to will’ is a dense, paradigm-level claim about what surveillance erodes.
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 1566; Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 70

Broader Connections

• Surveillance capitalism rests on extreme inequalities of knowledge and power #expands (0.80) — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 45
• Surveillance capitalism functions as a profoundly antidemocratic social force #complicates (0.75) — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 1643