Today, the entire world has become a potential (digital) factory—and the inability to define where the borders of this global factory lie defines our present uncertainty. What if a small handful of factories in China or Africa can produce all the material goods the planet needs? And what happens if those last industrial centers get hit by automation? - Sad By Design, Geert Lovink
Once the last drops of blood have been extracted from the stones the stones will be discarded. Surveillance capitalism was the last way to monetize a population already living on credit. The only thing left after our behavior patterns is our organs, which aren't very good anyway. The data models built from all this data exhaust are a clumsy tool that's dangerous no matter who weilds it, be it government or corporation.
We'll see a bifurcation into two internets, or many internets. The "free" internet of surveillance, dark patterns, propagandizing demographically-targeted media feifdoms, and boutique internets of services for the now totally ascendent but dwindling-in-numbers aristocracy.
A statement advanced in the topic chat seemed to imply that invasions of privacy are a price that we as a people pay for technology, and that private corporations are more trustworthy stewards of our private data than governments, presumably because governments succumb to ideologies and might victimize us for holding opposing ideologies, whereas corporations are only concerned with optimizing for profit. To this I would like to suggest that optimizing services for shareholder profit over the needs of those who actually use technologies *is* an ideology, and it is an ideology where your needs as a user are always at the bottom of the list. As the company becomes more and more optimized for profit, and monopolizes services that become necessities for life, there is even less of a need to advocate for users. Governments like the one active in the United States operate in many way as an extension of business, lobbying power makes sure that no regulations get in the way of crucial services and infrastructure which have become businesses. Democratic power over the services and infrastructure that we need to live is the goal. Transparency and the right to vote on them is what we need. A better world is possible and it will not be achieved inside the black-box, unelected-power-centers of Google and Facebook.