Surveillance capitalists now control society’s definitive principle of social ordering through privatized knowledge.
Evidence
This unprecedented concentration of knowledge produces an equally unprecedented concentration of power: asymmetries that must be understood as the unauthorized privatization of the division of learning in society. This means that powerful private interests are in control of the definitive principle of social ordering in our time, just as Durkheim warned of the subversion of the division of labor by the powerful forces of industrial capital a century ago. As things currently stand, it is the surveillance capitalist corporations that know. It is the market form that decides. It is the competitive struggle among surveillance capitalists that decides who decides. — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 603
Categorization
- DEFINE: Defines ‘unauthorized privatization of the division of learning’ — the core concept that knowledge concentration substitutes for the division of labor as society’s ordering principle.
- XREF: Extends Durkheim’s division-of-labor warning into the present; connects to Marxian analytic about capitalism’s next accumulation regime. — connects to: Corporate-controlled social knowledge reorders society in favor of corporations over citizens. — Nick Couldry & Ulises A. Mejias, The Costs of Connection: How Data Is…, 368; Dominance over society’s division of learning is surveillance capitalism’s new axial principle — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 566; The surveillance capitalist project extends to society itself as an object of certainty — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 1699 (+1 more)
Broader Connections
- Dominance over society’s division of learning is surveillance capitalism’s new axial principle
#corroborates(0.85) — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 566 - The surveillance capitalist project extends to society itself as an object of certainty
#expands(0.80) — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 1699 - Surveillance capitalism rests on extreme inequalities of knowledge and power
#expands(0.78) — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 45