Nick’s Reviews > The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power > Status Update

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?

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.