Behavior modification resurfaced as a market project after state versions were rejected

Evidence

Unknown to the senators, scholars, rights activists, litigators, and many other citizens who stood against the antidemocratic incursions of the behavioral engineering vision, these methods had not died. The project would resurface in a wholly unexpected incarnation as a creature of the market, its unprecedented digital capabilities, scale, and scope now flourishing under the flag of surveillance capitalism. During the same years that US democratic forces combined to resist behavior modification as a form of state power, the energies of capitalist counterinsurgency were already at work within society. The corporation was to enjoy the rights of personhood but be free of democratic obligations, legal constraints, moral calculations, and social considerations. Certainly in the US case, a weakened state in which elected officials depend upon corporate wealth in every election cycle has shown little appetite to contest behavior modification as a market project, let alone to stand for the moral imperatives of the autonomous individual. — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 1024

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to Citizens United and corporate personhood debates; the corporation as legal person with no democratic obligations. — connects to: 1970s congressional scrutiny drove behavior modification out of civilian institutions — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 1020; Mid-century observers could not imagine behavioral modification as a private market project — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 1023; Behavior modification survived only by renaming itself without positive reinforcement — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 1022
• SEED: Angle: the concept of ‘capitalist counterinsurgency’ — how market actors rescued a disciplinary project rejected by the state after Watergate-era backlash.

Broader Connections

• Mid-century observers could not imagine behavioral modification as a private market project #corroborates (0.85) — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 1023
• Behavior modification survived only by renaming itself without positive reinforcement #contradicts (0.72) — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 1022