"The digital economy has torn down the conventional boundaries between governing, commerce, and private life. In our digital age, social media companies engage in surveillance, data brokers sell personal information, tech companies govern our expression of political views, and intelligence agencies free-ride off e-commerce. The customary lines between politics, economics, and society are rapidly vanishing, and the three spheres are melding into one – one gigantic trove of data, one colossal data market, that allows corporations and governments to identify and cajole, to stimulate our consumption and shape our desires, to manipulate us politically, to watch, surveil, detect, predict, and, for some, punish. In the process, the traditional limits placed on the state and on governing are being eviscerated, as we turn more and more into marketized malleable subjects who, willingly or unwittingly, allow ourselves to be nudged, recommended, tracked, diagnosed, and predicted by a blurred amalgam of governmental and commercial initiatives.

"The collapse of these different spheres is disempowering to us as individuals. Resisting state excess – whether in the form of J. Edgar Hoover's FBI and surveillance programs like COINTELPRO, loyalty oaths and McCarthyism, or ordinary civil rights violations – can be harrowing and difficult. But trying to rein in a behemoth that includes the NSA, Google, Facebook, Netflix, Amazon, Samsung, Target, Skype, and Microsoft, to check a tenticular oligarchy that spans government, commerce, surveillance, and the private sphere, can feel even more daunting. Before, in the analog age, there were ways to divide and conquer, or at least to try – to attempt to build bridges with civic institutions to check the powers of the state. But today the interests are so aligned that the task feels practically impossible.

"At the root of it all is the fact that the line between governance, commerce, surveillance, and private life is evaporating. What we face today is one unified, marketized space. The famous lines drawn in the nineteenth century – for instance, in Max Weber's seminal work on economy and society – are vanishing. Governing is collapsing into commerce as states such as China, Russia, and the United States increasingly seek to secure what Evgeny Morozov calls their 'digital sovereignty' through trade regulation – passing laws that require tech companies to store their citizens' data on servers located within the state's territorial boundaries or placing restrictions on Internet provides for services such as Gmail. Commerce is collapsing into surveillance, right before our eyes, as retailers begin to collect all our data. And commerce is turning into governance as new data markets emerge, allowing businesses, employers, salespeople, bureaucrats, advertisers, the police, and parole officers to track our physical movements, to follow our Internet browsing, to know what we read, what we like, what we wear, whom we communicate with, what we think, how we protest, and where we spend our money."