Data-driven targeting achieves an intimate, auto-fitting mould over individual subjects.

Evidence

What is actually personalized in this new social knowledge is the fit to commercial targeting. The fit is intimate. As Bruce Schneier puts it, data colonialism today offers “a very intimate form of surveillance.” Tracking provides an “auto-fitting mould,” in Deleuze’s prescient phrase from three decades ago. … That world would provide marketing opportunities without limit: “Sensor revealing that you’re thirsty? Here’s a coupon for smart water.” Or as a marketing professional more bluntly put it, “Treat your customers like dogs.” — Nick Couldry & Ulises A. Mejias, The Costs of Connection, 402

Categorization

• XREF: Deleuze’s ‘auto-fitting mould’ and control-society theses directly parallel theories of surveillance capitalism and anticipatory control the reader already knows. — connects to: Most US job applicants face automated personality screening before any human contact — Nick Couldry & Ulises A. Mejias, The Costs of Connection: How Data Is…, 228; Quantification allocates the power to measure to some actors over others. — Nick Couldry & Ulises A. Mejias, The Costs of Connection: How Data Is…, 385