This newly intensified role for both capitalism and governments in managing social life became possible only through the unprecedented technological opportunities for connection that we know collectively as the internet. Their origins lie in investment from the US Cold War military-industrial complex and subsequent massive corporate investment that transformed the internet into a global space for corporate networking and transnational market coordination. Through the internet and its embedding into everyday life and business emerged something else: the possibility of a new type of economic and social order.

Nick Couldry & Ulises A. Mejias, The Costs of Connection, loc. 107