Terrorism becomes the pretext for demanding automated certainty machines

Evidence

Unsurprisingly, instrumentarian power is consistently called into action as a solution, if not the solution, to the threat of terrorism. Acts of terror reject the authority of civilizational norms and reveal the impossibility of society without mutual trust. Governments now turn to instrumentarian power as the solution to this new source of societal uncertainty, demanding the certainty machines that promise direct, reliable means of detection, prediction, and even the automatic actuation of countermeasures. — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 1228

Categorization

• XREF: Links to surveillance studies on the security-industrial complex and to the reader’s existing interest in state-capital entanglement from the spine of this book. — connects to: Vague, unidentifiable threats like terrorism prove harder for victims to comprehend or counter — John T. Jost and Jim Sidanius, Political Psychology, 4172; Rare-event terrorism makes category-based prediction produce mass false positives; Terrorism incites outsized public fear through unpredictability, lethality, and uncontrollability (+4 more)

Broader Connections

• Rare-event terrorism makes category-based prediction produce mass false positives #corroborates (0.80)
• Terrorism incites outsized public fear through unpredictability, lethality, and uncontrollability #corroborates (0.80)
• Automated targeting thresholds centralize atrocity into a single parameter-setting decision. #expands (0.80)
• Security certificates infer terrorist identity from association and history rather than acts #expands (0.80) — Sherene Razack, Casting Out, 96
• Vague, unidentifiable threats like terrorism prove harder for victims to comprehend or counter #corroborates (0.75) — John T. Jost and Jim Sidanius, Political Psychology, 4172
• The American War on Terror normalized pervasive state surveillance well beyond Orwell’s imaginings #expands (0.75) — Khaled A. Beydoun, The New Crusades_ Islamophobia and the…, 261