Extraction quarry must be both unprotected and available at zero cost if this logic of accumulation is to succeed. These requirements are also an Achilles heel. Code is law for Google now, but the risk of new laws in its established and anticipated territories remains a persistent danger to surveillance capitalism. If new laws were to outlaw extraction operations, the surveillance model would implode. This market form must either gird itself for perpetual conflict with the democratic process or find new ways to infiltrate, seduce, and bend democracy to its ends if it is to fulfill its own inner logic. The survival and success of surveillance capitalism depend upon engineering collective agreement through all available means while simultaneously ignoring, evading, contesting, reshaping, or otherwise vanquishing laws that threaten free behavioral surplus.

Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Cap…, loc. 338