Now the proselytizers of ubiquitous computing join Marx and other modern utopianists in postulating a new phase of history, like Paradiso’s “revolutionary phase shift,” in which all of society is reassembled in a novel and superior pattern. Despite the fact that inevitability is the opposite of politics and history, apostles of the apparatus routinely hijack historical metaphors that lend a veneer of gravitas to their claims. The rise of the apparatus is alternatively cast as the inauguration of a new “age,” “era,” “wave,” “phase,” or “stage.” This kind of historical framing conveys the futility of opposition to the categorical inevitability of the march toward ubiquity.

Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Cap…, loc. 693