Our argument, however, tries to go deeper. The minimal self-integrity under threat is not the sort of thing that human beings can trade without losing touch with what constitutes them as selves rather than as inputs to a collective intelligence or information-processing system. Two senses of self are in play here. Capitalism affirms, for sure, the uniquely identifiable reference point on which all notions of the self hang (it is, after all, this bodily subject whose market potential gets traded in proxy form). But at the same time, capitalism invites us to lose control over a core element in the content of that identified self whose continuity (and change) we value with time. By installing automated surveillance into the space of the self, we risk losing the very thing—the open-ended space in which we continuously monitor and transform ourselves over time—that constitutes us as selves at all.

Nick Couldry & Ulises A. Mejias, The Costs of Connection, loc. 489