The Age of Surveillance Capitalism

Introduction

Chapter 1. Home or Exile in the Digital Future

VI. The Outline, Themes, and Sources of this Book

I developed a fresh appreciation for the intellectual courage and pioneering insights of classic texts, in which authors such as Durkheim, Marx, and Weber boldly theorized industrial capitalism and industrial society as it rapidly constructed itself in their midst during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. My work here has also been inspired by mid-twentieth century thinkers such as Hannah Arendt, Theodor Adorno, Karl Polanyi, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Stanley Milgram [...]

Part I. The Foundatations of Surveillance Capitalism

Chapter 3. The Discovery of Behavioral Surplus

VIII. Summarizing the Logic and Operations of Surveillance Capitalism

This new market form declares that serving the genuine needs of people is less lucrative, and therefore less important, than selling predictions of their behavior.

1. The Logic

[T]here is no exit, no voice, and no loyalty , only helplessness, resignation, and psychic numbing.

Part II. The Advance of Surveillance Capitalism

Chapter 11. The Right to the Future Tense

I. I Will to Will

In fulfilling my promise, I make it manifest. This act of will is my claim to the future tense.

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The concept of “freedom of speech” as a formal right emerged only when society evolved to a degree of political complexity that the freedom to speak came under threat.

Part III. Instrumentarian Power for a Third Modernity

Chapter 13. Big Other and the Rise of Instrumentarian Power

I. Instrumentarianism as a New Species of Power

Because it does not claim our bodies for some grotesque regime of pain and murder, we are prone to undervalue its effect and lower our guard.

Conclusion

Chapter 18.A Coup From Above

IV. What Is Surveillance Capitalism?

Using Karl Polanyi's lens, we see that surveillance capitalism annexes human experience to the market dynamic so that it is reborn as behavior: the fourth “fictional commodity”. Polanyi's first three fictional commodities—land, labor, and money— were subjected to law.

V. Surveillance Capitalism and Democracy

According to the Pew survey, only 40 percent of US respondents support democracy and simultaneously reject the alternatives.