5. The dispossession cycle: First at Google and later at Facebook and other firms, surveillance capitalist leaders mastered the rhythms and stages of dispossession. Audacious incursions are pursued until resistance is met, followed by a range of tactics from elaborate public relations gambits to legal combat, all designed to buy time for gradual habituation to once-outrageous facts. A third stage features public demonstrations of adaptability and even retreat, while in the final stage resources are redirected to achieve the same objectives camouflaged by new rhetoric and tactics.

Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Cap…, loc. 1081