Inevitabilism enshrines the apparatus of ubiquity as progress but conceals the realpolitik of surveillance capitalism at work behind the scenes. We know that there can be alternative paths to a robust information capitalism that produces genuine solutions for a third modernity. We have seen that surveillance capitalism was discovered and honed in history, handcrafted by men and women to serve the interests of impatient capital. It is this same logic that now demands ubiquity, ready to colonize technical developments for the sake of its imperatives and growth. Inevitabilism operates in the service of these imperatives as it distracts attention from the ambitions of a rising economic order and the competitive anxieties that drive the surveillance project toward certainty, thus necessitating its ever-more-voracious claims on our behavior.

Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Cap…, loc. 709