The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power Highlight

Contract in this context of perfect rationality is what Williamson describes as “a world of planning.” Such planning was the basic institution of socialist economics, where the “new man” was idealized as possessing “a high level of cognitive competence” and therefore, it was espoused, could design highly effective plans.14 Varian deftly swaps out socialism’s “new man” and installs instead a market defined by surveillance capitalism’s economic imperatives, expressed through a ubiquitous computational architecture, the machine intelligence capabilities to which data are continuously supplied, the analytics that discern patterns, and the algorithms that convert them into rules.