So what happens next? Or: another publication ends where we all—repeat, all of us—know it should have begun

VI. CONCLUSION: DISMANTLING THE SYSTEM
Surveillance capitalism is not just a business model. It is a system, geopolitical, institutional, and epistemic. It is held together by regulation (or lack of), trade rules, policy, and narratives. It is reinforced by governments, especially the United States, and advanced through international institutions that shape how the digital economy works and who it serves. It is legitimized by expert networks and sanitized through language that turns extraction into efficiency and concentration of power into innovation.

Artificial intelligence has made this system even more powerful. AI technologies—especially predictive models, automated decision systems, and generative tools feed on the data extraction pipelines that surveillance capitalism built. AI provides a new layer of legitimacy framed as progress, innovation, or national competitiveness, even as it deepens asymmetries of power and concentration of market and control. The surveillance capitalist order now markets itself as an AI revolution.

This system did not emerge by accident. It was built through policy frameworks, trade negotiations, legal exemptions, deregulation, development finance, and decades of strategic inaction. And because it was built, it can be dismantled. But dismantling surveillance capitalism will take more than new laws or one-off reforms. It will require structural change of how data is governed, how power is held to account, and how knowledge itself is produced and deployed in policymaking.

This paper has taken a bird’s-eye view of that system. It has traced the foundations of surveillance capitalism, not just to Big Tech companies, but to the governments, international institutions, and expert and academic infrastructures that sustain it. It has argued that surveillance capitalism is not just a market problem, but a governance problem. A democracy problem. A global problem.

The road forward will not be easy. Many actors across sectors, government, academia, and civil society continue to benefit from the system as it is. But cracks are showing. Resistance is growing. What’s needed now is not just critique, but coordination. Not just opposition, but alternatives.

If surveillance capitalism is to be replaced, we must be ready to build something better in its place: a model of digital governance that serves people and the environment, protects rights, promotes the public good, and treats democratic control as a tool.

(accessed online at https://www.hks.harvard.edu/centers/carr-ryan/publications/geopolitics-surveillance-capitalism)

With that concluding word, “tool,” the report dies for want of anything like a Plan B.