Economic historians describe the dedication to lawlessness among the Gilded Age “robber barons” for whom Herbert Spencer’s social Darwinism played the same role that Hayek, Jensen, and even Ayn Rand play for today’s digital barons. In the same way that surveillance capitalists excuse their corporations’ unprecedented concentrations of information and wealth as the unavoidable result of “network effects” and “winner-take-all” markets, the Gilded Age industrialists cited Spencer’s specious, pseudoscientific “survival of the fittest” as proof of a divine plan intended to put society’s wealth in the hands of its most aggressively competitive individuals.

Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Cap…, loc. 340