3. Historical context: Surveillance capitalism found shelter in the neoliberal zeitgeist that equated government regulation of business with tyranny. This “paranoid style” favored self-management regimes that imposed few limits on corporate practices. In a parallel development, the “war on terror” shifted the government’s attention from privacy legislation to an urgent interest in the rapidly developing skills and technologies of Google and other rising surveillance capitalists. These “elective affinities” produced a trend toward surveillance exceptionalism, which further sheltered the new market form from scrutiny and nurtured its development.

Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Cap…, loc. 1079