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

Who knows? Who decides? Who decides who decides?

Digital dispossession is not an episode but a continuous coordination of action, not a wave but the tide itself. Google’s leaders understood from the start that their success would require continuous and pervasive fortifications designed to defend their “repetitive sin” from contest and constraint. [...] In order for them to assert and exploit their freedom, democracy would have to be kept at bay.

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.