The Great Shift: From Knowledge Society to Captive Masses How Surveillance Capitalism Took Control of Human Freedom
29.10.2025 — Page 214–215 The Great Shift: From Knowledge Society to Captive Masses How Surveillance Capitalism Took Control of Human Freedom By Rahul Ramya Human civilization entered the 21st century with a promise: knowledge will be our liberation. Schools, libraries, public universities, Doordarshan, BBC — we believed that an informed citizen could not be enslaved. But a silent transformation has occurred. As Hannah Arendt warned, authoritarianism thrives when society collapses into a controlled mass — individuals isolated yet collectively manipulated. Today, this mass is not gathered in a stadium — it is connected by screens . And the rulers are not dictators — but data-extracting corporations . We entered a new political-economic order: Surveillance Capitalism — where human experience becomes raw material for profit. No chains. No camps. Just apps, convenience, and personalization. I. The New Extraction: Human Data as Profit Once, labor exploitation...