Although he did not name it, the visionary of ubiquitous computing, Mark Weiser, foresaw the immensity of instrumentarian power as a totalizing societal project. He did so in a way that suggests both its utter lack of precedent and the danger of confounding it with what has gone before: “hundreds of computers in every room, all capable of sensing people near them and linked by high-speed networks have the potential to make totalitarianism up to now seem like sheerest anarchy.” In fact, all those computers are not the means to a digital hyper-totalitarianism. They are, as I think Weiser sensed, the foundation of an unprecedented power that can reshape society in unprecedented ways.

Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Cap…, loc. 1265