Behavioral surplus extraction from workers moved from lab to commercial market

Evidence

In 2010 Pentland and his 2009 coauthors founded a company, Sociometric Solutions, to bring Skinner’s longed-for “instruments and methods” to the marketplace. It was one of many companies that Pentland would create to apply the rigors of his social physics to captive populations of office workers. Sociometric Solutions’ CEO, Ben Waber, one of Pentland’s doctoral students, calls his operation “people analytics,” and in his book of the same name, he anticipates a future of “connection, collaboration, and data” with the badge or something like it “deployed across millions of individuals at different companies in countries all over the world for not minutes but years or decades.… Imagine what we could learn about to help people collaborate more effectively.…” — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 1351

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the earlier chapters on how behavioral surplus production flows through prediction products into means of behavioral modification; also parallels the corporate colony framing of the workplace. — connects to: Behavioral surplus extraction extends from virtual spaces into physical life — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 623; Sidewalk Labs applied Google’s behavioral surplus model to physical urban space — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 720; Digital assistants convert inner life into calculable behavioral surplus for others’ profit — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 796 (+2 more)

Broader Connections

• Platforms extract behavioral surplus from human activity to predict and modify it. #expands (0.92) — , The Braided Reading EPUB, 809
• Behavioral surplus extraction forms the core logic of surveillance capitalism #expands (0.90) — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 70