Surveillance capitalism rules by instrumentarian power through its materialization in Big Other, which, like the ancient tyrant, exists out of mankind while paradoxically assuming human shape. Surveillance capitalism’s tyranny does not require the despot’s whip any more than it requires totalitarianism’s camps and gulags. All that is needed can be found in Big Other’s reassuring messages and emoticons, the press of the others not in terror but in their irresistible inducements to confluence, the weave of your shirt saturated with sensors, the gentle voice that answers your queries, the TV that hears you, the house that knows you, the bed that welcomes your whispers, the book that reads you.… Big Other acts on behalf of an unprecedented assembly of commercial operations that must modify human behavior as a condition of commercial success. It replaces legitimate contract, the rule of law, politics, and social trust with a new form of sovereignty and its privately administered regime of reinforcements.

Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Cap…, loc. 1629