False economy What’s in it for me? Understand what makes the

Prior changes to capitalism helped loosen 
regulations and change attitudes for the 
online age.
The story of surveillance capitalism is a modern 
one. But to understand its rise and current 
dominance, we need to look to the 1970s and 

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1980s. During this time, the rules of capitalism 
itself underwent a significant change.
The key message here is: Prior changes to 
capitalism helped loosen regulations and change 
attitudes for the online age.
Prior to the 1970s, capitalism was something 
that involved a system of laws and policies, 
collectively known as the double movement, 
which was designed to protect society from 
capitalism run amok.
As the historian Karl Polanyi describes it, the 
double movement was integrated into the 
capitalist system to make sure that the 
institutions involved weren’t harming labor, land, 
and money. Polanyi, like Adam Smith and other 
economists before him, recognized that 
capitalism contained potentially destructive 
tendencies. Unchecked greed and power-
mongering can have devastating effects, and the 
double movement was designed specifically to 
counteract these tendencies.
Nevertheless, two influential voices came to the 
forefront of economic policy in the 1970s, and 
they both suggested we’d be better off without 
the double movement. They were the Austrian 
economist Friedrich Hayek and the American 
economist Milton Friedman. These two men 
preached the gospel of a self-regulating free-
market economy, unburdened by annoying 
things like laws and regulations that only served 
to limit the boundless potential of the capitalist 
enterprise.
Both Hayek and Friedman received Nobel 
Prizes. This recognition validated their ideas and 
is probably why these ideas were quickly 
implemented around the world. In the United 
States, double movement regulations were 
systematically taken down – first, under the 
Jimmy Carter administration, then during Ronald 
Regan’s tenure. In Europe, free-market 
capitalism was seen as the perfect antidote to 
the threats of communism and totalitarianism. 
But it’s no coincidence that in the years since the 
dismantling of the double movement, social and 
economic inequality has reached dangerously 
high levels. In recent decades, unprecedented 
amounts of money has been transferred to the 
highest income brackets. In 2016, a report from 
the International Monetary Fund went so far as 
to call this disproportionate accumulation of 
wealth a threat to stability.
In this unregulated corporate environment, 
surveillance capitalism thrives. The inventor 
Thomas Edison once recognized what others, 
including the sociologist Emil Durkheim, have 
noticed: the principles of capitalism become the 
principles of society at large. If Google is 
successful, it must be right and good. And if 
surveillance capitalism is successful within the 
self-governing rules of free-market capitalism, 
then it, too, must be right and good.