Surveillance capitalism treats social trust as unnecessary friction to be eliminated

Evidence

In the dystopia of the uncontract, surveillance capitalism’s drive toward certainty fills the space once occupied by all the human work of building and replenishing social trust, which is now reinterpreted as unnecessary friction in the march toward guaranteed outcomes. The deletion of uncertainty is celebrated as a victory over human nature: our cunning and our opportunism. All that’s left to matter are the rules that translate reasons into action, the objective measures of behavior, and the degree of conformance between the two. Social trust eventually withers, a kind of vestigial oddity like a third nipple or wisdom teeth: traces of an evolutionary past that no longer appear in operational form because their context and therefore their purpose have vanished. — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 1058

Categorization

• DEEPTHINKING: The ‘third nipple or wisdom teeth’ metaphor for trust as vestigial organ is a dense, paradigm-shifting image: it implies trust is not merely suppressed but evolutionarily obsolete under surveillance capitalism — worth sitting with.
• DEFINE: Usefully defines the ‘uncontract’ as the regime where certainty displaces trust-building social work.
• XREF: connects to: Surveillance erodes interpersonal trust by removing the right to act without it — Nick Couldry & Ulises A. Mejias, The Costs of Connection: How Data Is…, 503; Surveillance capitalists dismissed privacy objections as habitual aversion to innovation — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 490; Surveillance capitalists exclude individuals because awareness is friction against knowledge production — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 1027 (+4 more)

Broader Connections

• Surveillance capitalism threatens the inward capacities that sustain social bonds #expands (0.85) — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 1566
• Resistance to surveillance capitalism requires deliberately creating friction against its smooth flows #complicates (0.75) — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 1657