Facebook’s adolescent-designed practices were institutionalized for the whole population

Evidence

Facebook’s early advantage in this work arose in no small measure from the simple fact that its founders and original designers were themselves adolescents and emerging adults. They designed practices for an imagined universe of adolescent users and college students, and those practices were later institutionalized for the rest of us, reducing the social world to a tally of “friends” who are not friends and “likes” that provide a continuous ticker tape of one’s value on the social market, stoking the anxieties of pre-adulthood and anticipating the mesmerizing social disciplines of the hive. — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 1423

Categorization

• DEFINE: Clarifies how the ‘friends’ and ‘likes’ tally enact a social market quantifying one’s value, a core mechanism of surveillance capitalism.
• XREF: Connects to the broader thesis that surveillance-capitalism platform design originates in narrow demographic assumptions that then scale to everyone. — connects to: Facebook’s behavior modification operates covertly at scale with no social or legal controls — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 955; Facebook’s vision subordinates whole societies, not just users, to its predictive embrace — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 1279; Facebook exploits the psychological needs of young people during identity formation. — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 1421 (+5 more)

Broader Connections

• Facebook cultivated the self-as-brand among ordinary individuals #expands (0.75) — Tim Wu, The Attention Merchants, 1004