Van der Pijl ’18 [Kees; January; Chair of International Relations and the University of Sussex, Director of the Centre for Global Political Economy (CGPE), President of the Committee of Vigilance against Resurgent Facism; Surveillance Capitalism and Crisis; “Introduction,” p. 6] SPark
The Post-Cold War, global intelligence infrastructure that grew out of it was then applied to a key problem big capital faced after the collapse of the USSR triggered a global restructuring of production: the existence of a billion-size surplus population, a reserve army of labour for which no employment was to be expected. This required devising control strategies of various types. After 9/11, the NeoConsrevived the War on Terror concept to stir and then repress segments of this vast reserve army of labour, developing the notion of Total Information Awareness to allow it to know in advance,not just the intentions of rival states ranged against the West or just insufficiently submissive, but more particularly, the potential systemic opposition to capitalism at home and abroad. Using double agent tactics as well as provocation and targeted assassination, this has created the condition of endless war and a politics of fear sustaining it. Politics and society today operate under a permanent state of exception in which the Internet has been turned into a vast search engine on the lookout formeaningful opposition. Meanwhile in the name of weeding out ‘fake news’, the big Internet companies such as Google have changed their algorithms toprevent Left websites from popping up in searches by the public: the World Socialist Website, Global Research, and others, have already experienced sharp declines innumbers of visitors (Tveten 2018: 22). Facebook takes orders from the United States and Israeli governments to remove accounts (Greenwald 2017). Why do these large Internet companies collaborate, and why do they collaborate with these two governments specifically? That is what I intend the clarify in the pages that follow.