Facebook engineers openly aspired to map all human behavior

Evidence

Recall Mark Zuckerberg’s boast that Facebook would know every book, film, and song a person had ever consumed and that its predictive models would tell you what bar to go to when you arrive in a strange city, where the bartender would have your favorite drink waiting. As the head of Facebook’s data science team once reflected, “This is the first time the world has seen this scale and quality of data about human communication.… For the first time, we have a microscope that… lets us examine social behavior at a very fine level that we’ve never been able to see before.…” A top Facebook engineer put it succinctly: “We are trying to map out the graph of everything in the world and how it relates to each other.” — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 1580

Categorization

• QUESTION: Worth chasing: whether modern Facebook executives still hold this totality ambition post-scandals, or whether it has been quietly abandoned.
• XREF: connects to: Facebook data employees work continuously to influence users’ moods and behavior — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 940; Behavioral engineering once reviled is now openly embraced by tech leadership — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 1266; Facebook’s vision subordinates whole societies, not just users, to its predictive embrace — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 1279