Should we grow weary of our own struggle for self-determination and surrender instead to the seductions of Big Other, we will inadvertently trade a future of homecoming for an arid prospect of muted, sanitized tyranny. A third modernity that solves our problems at the price of a human future is a cruel perversion of capitalism and of the digital capabilities it commands. It is also an unacceptable affront to democracy. I repeat Thomas Piketty's warning: “A market economy… if left to itself… contains powerful forces of divergence, which are potentially threatening to democratic societies and to the values of social justice on which they are based.” This is precisely the whirlwind that we will reap at the hands of surveillance capitalism, an unprecedented form of raw capitalism that is surely contributing to the tempering of commitment to the democratic prospect as it successfully bends populations to its soft-spoken will. It gives so much, but it takes even more.

Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Cap…, loc. 1642