This status quo was interrupted in 2013, when Edward Snowden revealed the hidden complicity between state security agencies and the tech companies. In the backlash that followed, surveillance capitalists confronted new public relations challenges in what they portrayed as an uneasy or even unwilling alliance between private power and state security needs. Nevertheless, new terrorist threats invariably orient public officials toward the intensification and deployment of Big Other and the instrumentarian power it signifies. However, their ability to access this immense power is fraught with tension. It is not simply theirs to command. They must work, at least in part, through the surveillance capitalists.

Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Cap…, loc. 1230