Ed-tech firms openly link behavioral conditioning to profit-making from user action.

Evidence

The goal of everything we do is to change people’s actual behavior at scale. We want to figure out the construction of changing a person’s behavior, and then we want to change how lots of people are making their day-to-day decisions. When people use our app, we can capture their behaviors and identify good and bad [ones]. Then we develop “treatments” or “data pellets” that select good behaviors. We can test how actionable our cues are for them and how profitable certain behaviors are for us. — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 927

Categorization

• CANDY: The industry insider casually admitting they design ‘data pellets’ to select profitable behaviors is striking, quotable material.
• SEED: A possible essay: the eerie resonance between Skinner’s pigeon ‘operants’ and ed-tech ‘data pellets’—behavioral conditioning dressed in startup language.
• DEEPTHINKING: The frank ‘how profitable certain behaviors are for us’ reveals the entire reward-schedule economy in a single company quote; this is the core of the book’s argument stated in the subject’s own words.
• XREF: connects to: Management consultancies openly frame behavioral surplus as monetizable market infrastructure. — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 677; Behavioral engineering once reviled is now openly embraced by tech leadership — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 1266; Digital assistants convert inner life into calculable behavioral surplus for others’ profit — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 796 (+6 more)

Broader Connections

• Surveillance capitalist experiments exploit knowledge asymmetry to engineer user behavior for profit #expands (0.88) — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 934
• Digital assistants convert inner life into calculable behavioral surplus for others’ profit #expands (0.85) — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 796
• Surveillance capitalism may realize Skinner’s utopia in service of profit #expands (0.85) — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 1188
• Behavioral engineering once reviled is now openly embraced by tech leadership #corroborates (0.80) — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 1266
• Economies of action get institutionalized into automated algorithms that modify behavior #expands (0.80) — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 939
• Internet platforms gained unprecedented power to manufacture user behavior #corroborates (0.78) — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 941
• Cornering behavioral surplus is an orchestrated strategy, not merely a technical feat #expands (0.75) — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 413