The Gilded Age millionaires, like today’s surveillance capitalists, stood on the frontier of a vast discontinuity in the means of production with nothing but blank territory in which to invent a new industrial capitalism free from constraints on the use of labor, the nature of working conditions, the extent of environmental destruction, the sourcing of raw materials, or even the quality of their own products. And like their twenty-first-century counterparts, they did not hesitate to exploit the very law that they despised, flying the banner of “private property” and “freedom of contract,” much as surveillance capitalists march under the flag of freedom of speech as the justification for unobstructed technological “progress,” a topic to which we shall return.

Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Cap…, loc. 341