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Friedman's cycle of public opinion and durable law now revert to us: it is up to us to use our knowledge, to regain our bearings, to stir others to do the same, and to found a new beginning... The Berlin Wall fell for many reasons, but above all it was because the people of East Berlin said, "No more!"

Public spaces to act on that will. What is at stake is the dominant principle of social ordering is an information civilization and our rights as individuals and societies to answer the questions Who knows? Who decides? Who decides who decides?

If democracy is to be replenished in the coming decades, it is up to us to rekindle the sense of outrage and loss over what is being taken from us. In this I do not mean only our "personal information." What is at stake here is the human expectation of sovereignty over one's own life and authorship of one's own experience. What is at stake is the inward experıence trom which we form the will to will and the public-

Glass life is intolerable, but so is fitting our faces with masks and draping our bodies in digitally resistant fabrics to thwart the ubiquitous lawless machines. Like every counter-declaration, hiding risks becomes an adaptation when it should be a rallying point for outrage. These conditions are unacceptable. Tunnels under this wall are not enough. This wall must come down.

Continuously tightening feedback loops cut off the means of exit, creating impossible levels of anxiety that further drive the loops toward confluence. What is to be killed here is the inner impulse toward autonomy and the arduous, exciting elaboration of the autonomous self as a source of moral judgment and authority capable of asking for a subway seat or standing against rogue power.

Social media is designed to engage and hold people of all ages, but it is principally molded to the psychological structure of adolescence and emerging adulthood, when one is naturally oriented toward the "others," especially toward the rewards of group recognition, acceptance, belonging, and inclusion.

The aim is the automation of society through tuning, herding, and conditioning people to produce preselected behaviors judged as desirable by the state and thus able to "preempt instability," as one strategic studies expert put it.

The rise of instrumentarianism power...grows through declaration, self-authorization, rhetorical misdirection, euphemism, and the quiet, audacious backstage moves specifically crafted to elude awareness as it replaces individual freedom with others knowledge and replaces society with certainty. It does not confront democracy but rather erodes it from within...

At no other time in historyhave private corporations of unprecedented wealth and power enjoyed the free exercise of economies of action supported by a pervasive global architecture of ubiquitous computational knowledge and control constructed and maintained by all the advanced scientific know-how that money can buy.

Writing in the Guardian, psychology professor Chris Chambers summarized that "the Facebook study paints a dystopian future in which academic researchers escape ethical restriction by teaming up with private companies to test increasingly dangerous or harmful interventions.

What happens to my will to will myself into the first person when the surrounding market cosmos disguises itself as my mirror, shape-shifting according to what it has decided I feel or felt or will feel: ignoring, goading, chiding, cheering, or punishing me?

In his last recorded speech Pericles enumerated the characteristics necessary in a statesman: "To know what must be done and to be able to explain it; to love one's country and to be incorruptible" (2.60.5). No one had these traits in greater measure than Pericles himself, and if he made errors, he of all the Athenians was most likely to put them right. His countrymen would miss him sorely.

Once dedicated to targeted online advertising, these markets now grow to encompass predictions about what human beings will do now, soon, and later, whether they make their way online, on sidewalks and roads, or through rooms, halls, shops, lobbies, and corridors. These ambitious goals foreshadow fresh incursions and dispossessions as resistance is neutralized and populations fall into dulled submission.

People habituate to the incursion with some combination of agreement, helplessness, and resignation. The sense of astonishment and outrage dissipates. The incursion itself, once unthinkable, slowly worms its way into the ordinary. Worse still, it gradually comes to seem inevitable. New dependencies develop. As populations grow numb, it becomes more difficult for individuals and groups to complain.

The extraction imperative demands that everything be possessed. In this new context, goods and services are merely surveillance-bound supply routes. It's not the car; it's the behavioral data from driving the car. It's not the map; it's the behavioral data from interacting with the map. The ideal here is continuously expanding borders that eventually describe the world and everything in it, all the time.

Google is a shape-shifter, but each shape harbors the same aim: to hunt and capture raw material...In all these cases the varied torrent of creative shapes is the sideshow to the main event: the continuous expansion of the extraction architecture to acquire raw material at scale to feed an expensive production process that makes prediction productd that attract and retain more customers.

The campaign knew "every single wavering voter in the country that it needed to persuade to vote for Obama, by name, address, race, sex, and income," and it had figured out how to target its television ads to these individuals. One breakthrough was the "persuasion score" that identified how easily each undecided voter could be persuaded to vote for the Democratic candidate.

The remarkable questions here concern the facts that our lives are rendered as behavioral data in the first place; that ignorance is a condition of this ubiquitous rendition; that decision rights vanish before one even knows that there is a decision to make; that there are consequences to this diminishment of rights that we can neither see nor foretell; that there is no exit no voice, and no loyalty,only helplessness

Surveillance is the path to profit that overrides "we the people," taking our decision rights without permission and even when we say "no." The discovery of behavioral surplus marks a critical turning point not only in Google's biography but also in the history of capitalism.

With Google's unique access to behavioral data, it would now be possible to know what a particular individual in a particular time and place was thinking, feeling, and doing. That this no longer seems astonishing to us, or perhaps even worthy of note, is evidence of the profound psychic numbing that has inured us to a bold and unprecedented shift in capitalist methods.

What is unbearable is that economic and social inequalities have reverted to the preindustrial feudal pattern but that we, the people, have not. We are not illiterate peasants, serfs, or slaves. Whether "middle class" or "marginalized," we share the collective historical condition of individualized persons with complex social experiences and opinions.

In the model of machine confluence, the "freedom" of each individual machine is subordinated to the knowledge of the system as a whole. Instrumentarian power aims to organize, herd, and tune society to achieve a similar social confluence, in which group pressure and computational certainty replace politics and democracy, extinguishing the felt reality and social function of an individualized existence.

It disposes us to rationalize the situation in resigned cynicism, create excuses that operate like defense mechanisms ("I have nothing to hide"), or find other ways to stick our heads in the sand, choosing ignorance out of frustration and helplessness.

Our dependency is at the heart of the commercial surveillance project, in which our felt needs for effective life vie against the inclination to resist its bold incursions. This conflict produces a psychic numbing that inures us to the realities of being tracked, parsed, mined, and modified.

Digital connection is now a means to others' commercial ends. At its core, surveillance capitalism is parasitic and self-referential. It revives Karl Marx's old image of capitalism as a vampire that feeds on labor, but with an unexpected turn. Instead of labor, surveillance capitalism feeds on every aspect of every human's experience.

The digital realm is overtaking and redefining everything familiar even before we have had a chance to ponder and decide. We celebrate the networked world for the many ways in which it enriches our capabilities and prospects, but it has birthed whole new territories of anxiety, danger, and violence as the sense of a predictable future slips away.

The man who pursues the truth by applying his pure and unadulterated thought to the pure and unadulterated object, cutting himself off as much as possible from his eyes and ears and virtually all the rest of his as body, as an impediment which, if present, prevents the soul trom attaining to the truth and clear thinking? Is not this the person, Simmias, who will reach the goal of reality, if anybody can?

But my dear Crito, why should we pay so much attention to what 'most people' think? The most sensible people, who have more claim to be considered, will believe that things have been done exactly as they have.

For let me tell you, gentlemen, that to be afraid of death is only another form of thinking that one is wise when one is not; it is to think that one knows what one does not know. No one knows with regard to death whether it is not really the greatest blessing that can happen to a man; but people dread it as though they were certain that it is the greatest evil.

You are mistaken, my friend, if you think that a man who is worth anything ought to spend his time weighing up the prospects of life and death. He has only one thing to consider in performing any action; that is, whether he is acting justly or unjustly, like a good man or a bad one.