As more people become underor unemployed, social controls for managing discontent need to be tightened. There are two main approaches we are seeing within the Cloud Empire for dealing with this. First, there are, in various countries, increasing alliances between the state and the private sector in supporting each other’s goals. We see a similarity in approaches across the political spectrum—from open to closed societies. These approaches include deregulation (if previous regulation even existed) of the media and technology industries in a manner that gives more market power to favored corporations; collaboration between the government and the private sector to develop and implement technologies for surveillance; expansion of the state’s power to impose special measures of surveillance during increasingly permanent periods of emergency; and comprehensive secrecy about what governments and corporations do with data collected from citizens, all in the name of security and antiterrorism. These practices are replicated in practically every country with a modern ICT infrastructure, regardless of whether they are democratic or authoritarian in character.

Nick Couldry & Ulises A. Mejias, The Costs of Connection, loc. 241