Since the turn of the 21st century, big data firms have emerged as a new challenger to the hybrid economic system because of the incredible amounts of personal data that has since become available. Our tastes, habits, financial transactions and physical movements are all now monitored and available for sale by big data firms. Additionally, East Asian nations also used the hybrid or the state-market model of development to bring about impressive economic gains. The economic rise of China has also lent credence to the claim that both the state and the market have worked together to bring about economic gains since the Chinese economy is a veritable kaleidoscope exhibiting hues of both the state and the market. And, after the Great Depression, the entire edifice of Keynesian macroeconomic policies was, arguably, a way for the state to provide a much-needed corrective. The Gilded Age that opened up new vistas for wealth creation under captains of industry like John Vanderbilt and Andrew Carnegie, saw sustained efforts by the US state to rein in large corporations through antitrust legislation that started with the Sherman Antitrust Act of 1874 and continued through the Clayton Antitrust Act of 1914. Earlier through the Factory Act of 1833 and later through the Ten Hours Act of 1848, the working day was first capped at 12 and then at 10 hours. Repeatedly, the British state intervened to make working conditions less onerous. For this reason, from time to time, the state has intervened in order to put things on an even keel.Įven during the heyday of the Industrial Revolution as the factory system and mass production got underway, the British state was protecting the interests of its citizens. However, if markets are left to their own devices, failures happen in the shape of a chronic undersupply of public goods like education and healthcare that may, in turn, lead to social unrest. Markets, as Amartya Sen has pointed out, also increase the freedoms available to people when they freely engage in buying and selling. Markets that are free from excessive state regulation not only deliver economic gains, but also infuse social order, it is argued. The idea that markets bring about economic gains is widely established. If people’s personal data is not prevented from becoming a commodity, big data firms would become unassailable and may come to dominate future social and economic life. The advent of surveillance capitalism is changing these age-old dynamics.

But, capitalism has always existed as a hybrid economic system combining the properties of both the state and the market to sustain social and economic order. In this quest, where some have identified the market as the institution that instils order, others have looked to the state. THROUGHOUT history, intellectuals have grappled with finding ways to bring about social and economic order.

In the age of surveillance capitalism