Abstract
Surveillance capitalism represents a new form of capitalism that converts human behavior into data for tracking, analysis, and monetization. Yet this framing obscures the deeper architecture that sustains it. More than a business model, surveillance capitalism constitutes a geopolitical system with institutional scaffolding—grounded in regulation (or its absence), legitimized by economic theory, promoted by trade rules, and protected by powerful states. Its endurance depends not only on market incentives but on a distributed architecture of norms, institutions, actors, and governance failures. At its core, surveillance capitalism is an extractive political economy built on the systematic capture and monetization of human experience. As Shoshana Zuboff (2022a) argues, this system enacts an “epistemic coup,” through which corporations assert ownership over behavioral data, eroding privacy, self-knowledge, and democratic legitimacy. This outcome is the product of deliberate political choices, neoliberal ideologies, and the retreat of the democratic state.
The surveillance capitalist order extends beyond technology firms, drawing on economic theories that treat data as a neutral input and surveillance as the price of personalization. It is reinforced by legal doctrines and institutionalized through international organizations, development banks, and standard-setting bodies that normalize extractive data practices under the guise of modernization. While the United States serves as its chief architect, the system operates globally, protected by trade agreements, digital infrastructure programs, and multilateral forums that entrench the norms of “trustworthy AI” and “data free flows with trust.” This paper maps the institutional foundations and geopolitical dynamics of the global surveillance ecosystem, tracing how power is produced, distributed, and enforced across this order. Ultimately, it argues that dismantling surveillance capitalism requires structural transformation—not only of markets, but of the political, legal, and epistemic arrangements that sustain it.