Economic historian Philip Mirowski summarizes the “metatheses” that since the 1980s helped to constitute neoliberalism as a loose “paradigm,” despite its amorphous, multifaceted, and sometimes contradictory theories and practices. Among these, several became essential shelter for the surveillance capitalists’ bold actions, secret operations, and rhetorical misdirection: (1) democracy was to be constrained in favor of actively reconstructing the state as the agent of a stable market society; (2) the entrepreneur and the corporation were conflated, enshrining “corporate personhood,” rather than the rights of citizens, as the focus of legal protections; (3) freedom was defined negatively, as “freedom from” interference in the natural laws of competition, and all control was understood as coercive, except for market control; and (4) inequality of wealth and rights was accepted and even celebrated as a necessary feature of a successful market system and a force for progress.

Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Cap…, loc. 1923