SURVEILLANCE CAPITALISM is the dominant economic institution of our time, and it is on a collision course with democracy. Surveillance capitalism’s giants—Google, Facebook, Amazon, Microsoft, and Apple—now own, operate, and intermediate nearly every aspect of human engagement with global information and communication systems, unconstrained by public law. All roads to economic, social, and even political participation now lead through a handful of unaccountable companies, a condition that has intensified during two years of the COVID-19 pandemic.
The result is a trail of social wreckage: the whole-sale destruction of privacy, vast corporate concentrations of information about people and society, poisoned discourse, fractured societies, remote systems of behavior manipulation, and weakened democratic institutions. While the Chinese designed and deployed digital technologies to advance their own system of authoritarian rule, the West failed…