Individually and collectively, the knowledge, power, and wealth that surveillance capitalists command would be the envy of any ancient potentate, just as they are now coveted by the modern state. With 2017 balance sheets reporting $126 billion in cash and securities for Microsoft, $92 billion for Google, and about $30 billion for Facebook, and the financial markets endorsing their ever-expanding instrumentarian regimes with more than $1.6 trillion in market capitalization in mid-2017, these are the rare utopianists who can oversee the translation of their imaginations into fact without soldiers to pave the way in blood.

Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Cap…, loc. 1289