Continuous nudging undermines its own autonomy justification

Evidence

Whereas critics quickly saw Nudge as a way of locking in market-oriented behavior, Thaler and Sunstein claim that the nudge is just a tilting of the “choice environment” that helps individuals reach the outcomes they would want anyway “as judged by themselves.” But how many times does an environment have to nudge you before it starts to govern what you want? Sunstein’s claim that Nudge was always about enhancing individual “autonomy” carries little weight when the nudge is continuous, systematic, and opaque. The nudge is also a useful technique for data colonialism, generating at scale not the gentle subtlety Thaler and Sunstein intended but the force of what legal scholar Karen Yeung calls the “hypernudge”: dynamic and interactive behavior modulation enabled by continuous connectivity and continuous data flows. — Nick Couldry & Ulises A. Mejias, The Costs of Connection, 434

Categorization

• DEFINE: Defines ‘hypernudge’ — Karen Yeung’s term for continuous, data-driven behavior modulation distinct from the discrete gentle nudge.
• XREF: The scaling critique of Nudge connects to the attention/surveillance school’s ‘choice architecture over time becomes manipulation’ argument.
• QUESTION: At what scale/frequency does a nudge stop being choice-enhancing and start determining preference? The chapter poses but doesn’t fully resolve the threshold.