“The decades of economic injustice and immense concentrations of wealth that we call the Gilded Age succeeded in teaching people how they did not want to live. That knowledge empowered them to bring the Gilded Age to an end, wielding the armaments of progressive legislation and the New Deal. Even now, when we recall the lordly ‘barons’ of the late nineteenth century, we call them ‘robbers.’
“Surely the Age of Surveillance Capitalism will meet the same fate as it teaches us how we do not want to live. It instructs us in the irreplaceable value of our greatest moral and political achievements by threatening to destroy them It reminds us that shared trust is the only real protection from uncertainty. It demonstrates that power untamed by democracy can only lead to exile and despair. . . . 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. In the conquest of nature, industrial capitalism’s victims were mute. Those who would try to conquer human nature will find their intended victims full of voice, ready to name danger and defeat it. This book is intended as a contribution to that collective effort.”
The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, Shoshana Zuboff, (Public Affairs, 2019).