Although it is not murderous, instrumentarianism is as startling, incomprehensible, and new to the human story as totalitarianism was to its witnesses and victims. Our encounter with unprecedented power helps to explain why it has been difficult to name and know this new species of coercion, shaped in secret, camouflaged by technology and technical complexity, and obfuscated by endearing rhetoric. Totalitarianism was a political project that converged with economics to overwhelm society. Instrumentarianism is a market project that converges with the digital to achieve its own unique brand of social domination.

Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Cap…, loc. 1142