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

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!"

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?