A toy maker’s CEO hire signaled a shift from products to data collection

Evidence

When Mattel hired a new CEO in January 2017, it’s no surprise that the company looked to Google, selecting its president for the Americas with responsibility for Google’s commercial and advertising sales operations. Most analysts agreed that the appointment heralded Mattel’s commitment to its innovations in internet-enabled toys and virtual reality, but the appointment underscores the shift in focus from making great products for you to collecting great data about you. — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 832

Categorization

• SEED: The CEO-appointment read as ‘from making great products for you to collecting great data about you’ is a compact emblem of the platform-era inversion of the product — good fodder for a piece on how ‘the customer’ became raw material.
• XREF: connects to: Stock-based executive pay widened CEO-worker income gaps. — Gerald F. Davis & Suntae Kim, Financialization of the Economy, 56; Apple’s CEO publicly attacked its rivals’ data-mining business model in 2015

Broader Connections

• Apple’s CEO publicly attacked its rivals’ data-mining business model in 2015 #exemplifies (0.75)