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Capitalism and the development of technology are inextricably interlinked, from capitalism’s origins. As we saw in the Prologue to this issue, Freud’s awareness of the mix of losses with gains within technological innovation suggested a critique of capitalist “progress” in which any such “progress” is at very least subject to question: what appears as progress and benefit may have little benefit or involve losses. In our time, it has become all but impossible to question the value of the changes to our lives brought, or wrought, by technology: everyone is subject to what can only be recognized as a regime of ever-newness whose rate of change we are helpless to modify.
The articles in this issue by Balick, Johanssen, and Kahoud strongly suggest that the ego’s increased scope of mastery via technology is much more illusion than truth. But, consistent with the ego’s self-illusions (Freud, 1923; Lacan, 1991), in the personal technology exemplified by the smartphone the user wishes to believe in a kind of mastery of her world with the help of technology, a visionary dominion over the world brought to her by the miracle of technology. The other side of these illusions is her ever-increasing enmeshment within an enormous and ever-larger network machinery of communication and data gathering. The growth of the internet into so many moments of our lives, in particular, the vast influence of social media on the internet, shows up not only now in the dynamics of presidential elections, but also in new forms of the control of users that have been given a collective name coined by Harvard Business School professor Shoshona Zuboff: “surveillance capitalism” (Zuboff, 2015, 2019). Zuboff’s term denotes a form of capitalism in which internet user data is gathered in massive data sets, used to develop algorithms and predict individual behavior in the search for profit maximization by those owning these data, and in which such data may also be legally available to government agencies wh