Surveillance capitalism thrives where individualized consumption meets a hostile neoliberal paradigm
Evidence
As I shall argue in the coming chapters, the same historical conditions that sent the iPod on its wild ride summoned the emancipatory promise of the internet into our everyday lives as we sought remedies for inequality and exclusion. Of most significance for our story, these same conditions would provide important shelter for surveillance capitalism’s ability to root and flourish. More precisely, the Apple miracle and surveillance capitalism each owes its success to the destructive collision of two opposing historical forces. One vector belongs to the longer history of modernization and the centuries-long societal shift from the mass to the individual. The opposing vector belongs to the decades-long elaboration and implementation of the neoliberal economic paradigm: its political economics, its transformation of society, and especially its aim to reverse, subdue, impede, and even destroy the individual urge toward psychological self-determination and moral agency. — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 96
Categorization
- DEFINE: Sets up the core analytic frame: surveillance capitalism’s success as the collision of the individualization vector with the neoliberal vector — a touchstone the whole book returns to.
- XREF: connects to: Surveillance capitalism feeds on the social transformations it causes — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 1104; Neoliberal anti-regulation ideology and the war on terror jointly sheltered surveillance capitalism from scrutiny — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 1079; Surveillance capitalism reproduces the very collectivism its neoliberal founders opposed. — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 1604 (+2 more)
Broader Connections
- Surveillance capitalism’s inevitabilist ideology presents its power as natural like a glacier
#complicates(0.78) — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 1258