The intelligence community and Google developed an elective affinity over information dominance.

Evidence

Google’s mission was to “organize and make accessible the world’s information,” and by late 2001 the intelligence community established “information dominance” in the public’s house, quickly institutionalizing it in hundreds of billions of dollars’ worth of state-sponsored global technology infrastructure, personnel, and practice. The contours of a new interdependency between public and private agents of information dominance began to emerge, one that is best understood through the lens of what the sociologist Max Weber once called an “elective affinity” born of a mutual magnetism that originates in shared meanings, interests, and reciprocities. — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 369

Categorization

• DEFINE: Introduces Weber’s ‘elective affinity’ as the concept for explaining the public-private surveillance symbiosis that followed 9/11.
• XREF: Weber’s elective affinity originates in The Protestant Ethic; the frame recurs in later scholarship on the military-surveillance-industrial complex. — connects to: Google’s success stems from radical social relations, not technological prowess alone — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 69; The NSA paid Google to build search technology for intelligence use — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 375

Broader Connections

• The NSA paid Google to build search technology for intelligence use #exemplifies (0.85) — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 375