4 Matching Annotations
  1. Jan 2023
    1. surveillance capitalism, invented by Google in 2001, benefitted from a couple of important historical windfalls. One is that it arose in the era of a neoliberal consensus around the superiority of self-regulating companies and markets. State-imposed regulation was considered a drag on free enterprise. A second historical windfall is that surveillance capitalism was invented in 2001, the year of 9/11. In the days leading up to that tragedy, there were new legislative initiatives being discussed in Congress around privacy, some of which might well have outlawed practices that became routine operations of surveillance capitalism. Just hours after the World Trade Center towers were hit, the conversation in Washington changed from a concern about privacy to a preoccupation with “total information awareness.” In this new environment, the intelligence agencies and other powerful forces in Washington and other Western governments were more disposed to incubate and nurture the surveillance capabilities coming out of the commercial sector.

      !- summary : surveillance capitalism incentives - popularity of neoliberal norm of minimizing government regulation - 9/11 accelerated popularity of a global surveillance state

  2. Jul 2021
    1. The narrative of Free America shaped the parameters of acceptable thinking for Smart America. Free trade, deregulation, economic concentration, and balanced budgets became the policy of the Democratic Party.

      The deregulation part has hurt us immensely. Cross reference this with the thesis found in American Amnesia by Jacob S. Hacker and Paul Pierson.

      Which parts of the Democratic party went along with this? Evidence? More of the deregulation parts seemed to be identified with the Republican party.

  3. Sep 2017
    1. “It is also important to note that what we are doing now is in some ways fulfilling a number of longstanding principles that other presidents have always talked about.”

      Neomi Rao, newly confirmed administrator of White House Information and Regulatory affairs attempts here to renounce personal ownership of deregulation efforts instead framing the current move as the continuation of an existing motion present in previous leadership. She attempts to insure the rational saliency of deregulation through this logic of a theoretical continuum.

  4. Jul 2015
    1. “Anybody that made it through the ’90s and [aughts] without having their libertarianism taking a pretty good hit wasn’t paying attention,” he says in a recent telephone interview. “We deregulated every g--d--- thing, and it came back at us in this way that we may never recover.”