Digital assistants convert inner life into calculable behavioral surplus for others’ profit

Evidence

This is a new frontier of behavioral surplus where the dark data continent of your inner life—your intentions and motives, meanings and needs, preferences and desires, moods and emotions, personality and disposition, truth telling or deceit—is summoned into the light for others’ profit. The point is not to cure but to render all of it as immeasurably tiny bits of behavior available for calculation so that each can take its place on the assembly line that moves from raw materials to product development, manufacturing, and sales. — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 796

Categorization

• ADDENDUM: Extends the Grafting & Growth metaphor of infrastructure to the assembly line of inner life — the machine invasion converts subjective depth into raw material.
• XREF: connects to: Digital capitalism profits from unpaid pleasurable user activity. — Yves Citton, The Ecology of Attention, 197; Social quantification lets corporations profit from participation without commodity purchase — Nick Couldry & Ulises A. Mejias, The Costs of Connection: How Data Is…, 166; Behavioral surplus extraction extends from virtual spaces into physical life — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 623 (+17 more)

Broader Connections

• Platforms extract behavioral surplus from human activity to predict and modify it. #corroborates (0.95) — , The Braided Reading EPUB, 809
• Surveillance capitalist experiments exploit knowledge asymmetry to engineer user behavior for profit #expands (0.90) — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 934
• Selling predictions of human behavior superseded serving genuine needs in web economics #expands (0.85) — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 293
• Economies of action get institutionalized into automated algorithms that modify behavior #expands (0.85) — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 939
• Behavioral surplus extraction from workers moved from lab to commercial market #expands (0.80) — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 1351
• Google’s auctions actually traded derivatives of behavioral surplus #exemplifies (0.80) — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 259
• Volume economies of behavioral surplus gave way to quality of prediction #expands (0.75) — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 621
• Abstracting value from life processes enables new commodified social relations #corroborates (0.75)