Google’s mission was to “organize and make accessible the world’s information,” and by late 2001 the intelligence community established “information dominance” in the public’s house, quickly institutionalizing it in hundreds of billions of dollars’ worth of state-sponsored global technology infrastructure, personnel, and practice. The contours of a new interdependency between public and private agents of information dominance began to emerge, one that is best understood through the lens of what the sociologist Max Weber once called an “elective affinity” born of a mutual magnetism that originates in shared meanings, interests, and reciprocities.

Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Cap…, loc. 369