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

In a chilling epilogue to this chapter in the history of surveillance capitalism, on March 28, 2017, a newly elected Republican Congress voted in favor of a resolution to overturn the broadband privacy regulations over which the FCC had struggled just months earlier. The rules had required cable and phone companies to obtain meaningful consent before using personal information for ads and profiling. The companies understood, and they persuaded Republican senators, that the principle of consent would strike a serious blow to the foundational mechanisms of the new capitalism: the legitimacy of unilateral surplus dispossession, ownership rights to surplus, decision rights over surplus, and the right to lawless space for the prosecution of these activities.146 To this end the resolution also prevented the FCC from seeking to establish similar protections in the future.