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

technology’s DNA comes already patterned by what the sociologist Max Weber called the “economic orientation.” Economic ends, Weber observed, are always intrinsic to technology’s development and deployment. “Economic action” determines objectives, whereas technology provides “appropriate means.” In Weber’s framing, “The fact that what is called the technological development of modern times has been so largely oriented economically to profit-making is one of the fundamental facts of the history of technology.”