Surveillance capitalism is what happened when US democracy stood down.
Two decades later, it fails any reasonable test of responsible global
stewardship of digital information and communications. The abdication of
the world’s information spaces to surveillance capitalism has become the
meta-crisis of every republic because it obstructs solutions to all
other crises.

The surveillance capitalist giants–Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon,
Microsoft, and their ecosystems–now constitute a sweeping
political-economic institutional order that exerts oligopolistic control
over most digital information and communication spaces, systems, and
processes.

Surveillance capitalism’s antidemocratic economic imperatives produce a
zero-sum dynamic in which the deepening order of surveillance capitalism
propagates democratic disorder and deinstitutionalization.

Without new public institutions, charters of rights, and legal
frameworks purpose-built for a democratic digital century, citizens
march naked, easy prey for all who steal and hunt with human data. Only
one of these contesting orders will emerge with the authority and power
to rule, while the other will drift into deinstitutionalization, its
functions absorbed by the victor.

Brad Parscale, Trump’s digital director, had gambled his modest budget
entirely on Facebook, where corporate staff members embedded within the
campaign helped the Trump team dominate surveillance capitalism’s key
operational mechanisms, referred to within Facebook as “the tools”.

With Facebook’s help, Parscale pursued an unconventional digital
strategy. The campaign identified three groups least likely to support
Trump–idealistic white liberals, young women, and African Americans—and
labeled these as “audiences” for “deterrence.”

“The tools” were deployed to persuade these citizens, especially Black
citizens, not to vote. As one Trump official boasted, “We have three
major voter suppression operations underway”. Trump’s data scientists,
including some from the consultancy Cambridge Analytica who had worked
on the Brexit “Leave” campaign, collaborated with Facebook staff to
master these “tools.”