Online advertising has quickly become one of the most important avenues through which brands reach consumers. It is lauded as one of the most effective ways for a business to grow, acquire new customers, and spread information.1 By some estimates, Internet advertising is a nearly $300 billion business.2

With the rise of surveillance capitalism digital platforms hunt and capture ever more dimensions of once private experience as raw material for datafication, production, and sales. Under these unprecedented conditions, elemental epistemic rights can no longer be taken for granted. Unlike twentieth century totalitarianism, however, surveillance capitalism does not employ soldiers and henchmen to threaten terror and murder. It is a new instrumentarian power that works through ubiquitous digital instrumentation to manipulate subliminal cues, psychologically target communications, impose choice architectures, trigger social comparison dynamics, and levy rewards and punishments – all aimed at remotely tuning, herding, and modifying human behavior in the direction of profitable outcomes and always engineered to preserve users’ ignorance. The result is best understood as the unauthorized privatization of the division of learning in society. Just as Emile Durkheim warned of the subversion of the division of labor by the powerful forces of industrial capital a century ago, today’s surveillance capital exerts private power over the definitive principle of social order in our time. We must promote individual epistemic sovereignty, law, and democracy as the only possible grounds for human freedom, a functional democratic society, and an information civilization founded on equality and justice.