Rosenfeld views democracy, capitalism, and liberal societies as equally oriented toward maximizing choice. But as democratic governments and liberal societies become captured by special interests, the market appears to be the only realm in which my choices are still guaranteed to mean something.
Modern adults have comparatively greater freedom to date and marry as they like but no control over the proliferation of dating apps and diminishing in-person opportunities to meet a potential romantic partner. They have choices, yet those choices are shaped by the companies that code their algorithms. We may perceive ourselves as free—Rosenfeld observes that much of contemporary discourse around marriage still centers on our right to choose our partner—while living in a network of conditions that heavily constrain our will. Personal liberty becomes a subjective experience at best and an illusion at worst. So who, exactly, is facilitating our convoluted relationship with money? The most glaring culprits are tech companies.
Market capitalism and large technology companies structure the architecture of choice itself — not just what is available but how options are presented. The deeper question is whether technology could reverse this, designing systems that move people back toward human-scale decision-making rather than optimizing for consumption.-
“We are not surveillance capitalism’s customers,” Zuboff says.
We are the sources of surveillance capitalism’s crucial surplus: the objects of a technologically advanced and increasingly inescapable raw-material extraction operation. Surveillance capitalism’s actual customers are the enterprises that trade in its markets for future behavior. View Highlight 2025-12-12
In Zuboff’s view, life under surveillance capitalism promises to be convenient and fun, a utopia of two-day deliveries and astonishingly well-curated “For You” pages. But this life requires a long obedience in a direction that we have no way of fully comprehending.
All our interactions with money are freighted with spiritual consequence. Rosenfeld’s history of choice and individuality is a history of how thoroughly capitalism has reshaped our concept of self; Zuboff’s analysis of the surveillance economy also functions as a study in human insatiability and greed.
Technology enables isolation from community by converting desires into utilities — mechanizing relationships rather than deepening understanding of the people nearby. The same tools that promise connection optimize for individual satisfaction, pulling attention away from the relational fabric that sustains community. relationshipsThe goal of his argument is to rob money of its primacy and remind his readers of its best use—to be generously dispensed as an expression of love. “For you know the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ,” Paul writes, “that though He was rich, yet for your sake He became poor, so that you through His poverty might become rich.”
American society is at an impasse, gridlocked by conflicts that treat every political contest as a zero-sum game for agency, indebted to surveillance capital for the uneven pleasures of optimized consumption. She suggests that we take this opportunity to “start wondering, without prejudgment, if choice as we know it is really what freedom should be all about.”
