In spite of its liberating potential, the second modernity was slated to become a hard place to live, and our conditions of existence today reflect this trouble. Some of the challenges of the second modernity arise from the inevitable costs associated with the creation and sustenance of one’s own life, but second-modernity instability is also the result of institutionalized shifts in economic and social policies and practices associated with the neoliberal paradigm and its rise to dominance. This far-reaching paradigm has been aimed at containing, rechanneling, and reversing the secular wave of second-modernity claims to self-determination and the habitats in which those claims can thrive.

Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Cap…, loc. 116