Surveillance capitalists used unilateral declarations to take without asking.

Evidence

On the “supply side,” surveillance capitalists deftly employed the entire arsenal of the declaration to assert their authority and legitimacy in a new and undefended digital world. They used declarations to take without asking. They camouflaged their purpose with illegible machine operations, moved at extreme velocities, sheltered secretive corporate practices, mastered rhetorical misdirection, taught helplessness, purposefully misappropriated cultural signs and symbols associated with the themes of the second modernity—empowerment, participation, voice, individualization, collaboration—and baldly appealed to the frustrations of second-modernity individuals thwarted in the collision between psychological yearning and institutional indifference. — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 606

Categorization

• DEFINE: Names the supply-side mechanism of ‘declaration’ — asserts authority and legitimacy in undefended digital space.
• XREF: The ‘teaching helplessness’ and co-opting of second-modernity empowerment language links to the platform-consent debates in Surveillance Capitalism’s earlier chapters. — connects to: A horizontalist group member publicly declared it over without others’ consent — Vincent Bevins, If We Burn: The Mass Protest Decade and…, 626