On the inadequacy of the current political class to create meaningful policies:
> "Google and other actors learned to obscure their operations, choosing to invade undefended individual and social territory until opposition is encountered, at which point they can use their substantial resources to defend at low cost wht had already been taken. In this way, surveillance assets are accumulated and attract significant surveillance capital while producing their own surprising new politics and social relations".
> "These new institutional facts have been allowed to stand for a variety of reasons: they were constructed at high velocity and designed to be undetectable. Outside a narrow realm of experts, few people understood their meaning. Structural asymmetries of knowledge and rights made it impossible for people to learn about these practices."
The general thrust:
> "Google’s Chief Economist Hal Varian celebrates such possibilities as new forms of contract, when in fact they represent the end of contracts. Google’s rendering of information civilization replaces the rule of law and the necessity of social trust as the basis for human communities with a new life-world of rewards and punishments, stimulus and response. Surveillance capitalism offers a new regime of comprehensive facts and compliance with facts. It is, I have suggested, a coup from above – the installation of a new kind of sovereign power."