The success of this coup de gens stands as sour testimony to the thwarted needs of the second modernity, which enabled surveillance capitalism to flourish and still remains its richest vein for extraction and exploitation. In this context it is not difficult to understand why Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg offers his social network as the solution to the third modernity. He envisions a totalizing instrumentarian order—he calls it the new global “church”—that will connect the world’s people to “something greater than ourselves.” It will be Facebook, he says, that will address problems that are civilizational in scale and scope, building “the long-term infrastructure to bring humanity together” and keeping people safe with “artificial intelligence” that quickly understands “what is happening across our community.”

Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Cap…, loc. 1631