From the dawn of the public internet and the world wide web in the mid-1990s, the liberal democracies failed to construct a coherent political vision of a digital century that advances democratic values, principles, and government. This failure left a void where democracy should be, a void that was quickly filled and tenaciously defended by surveillance capitalism. A handful of companies evolved from tiny startups into trillion-dollar vertically integrated global surveillance empires thriving on an economic construct so novel and improbable, as to have escaped critical analysis for many years: the commodification of human behavior.

– Shoshana Zuboff

Zuboff, Shoshana. “Surveillance Capitalism or Democracy? The Death Match of Institutional Orders and the Politics of Knowledge in Our Information Civilization”. Organization Theory 3, nr. 3 (juli 2022): 26317877221129290. https://doi.org/10.1177/26317877221129290.