The Stamp Act was experienced as a violation of the colonists’ rights not only as subjects of the empire but also as consumers of the empire: it was the first translation of consumers’ economic power into political power, a “radically new form of politics” in which the most ordinary members of colonial society experienced “an exhilarating surge of empowerment.”

Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Cap…, loc. 1596