Instrumentation enables calculating and modifying individuals’ susceptibility to ideas

Evidence

Computation thus replaces the political life of the community as the basis for governance. The depth and breadth of instrumentation make it possible, Pentland says, to calculate idea flow, social network structure, the degree of social influence between people, and even “individual susceptibilities to new ideas.” Most important, instrumentation makes it possible for those with the God view to modify others’ behavior. The data provide a “reliable prediction of how changing any of these variables will change the performance of all the people in the network” and thus achieve the optimum performance of Skinner’s superorganism. This mathematics of idea flow is the basis for Pentland’s version of a “plan” that dictates the targets and objectives of behavior change. Human behavior must be herded and penned within the parameters of the plan, just as behavior at Nadella’s construction site was continuously and automatically molded to policy parameters. Pentland calls this “tuning the network.” — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 1383

Categorization

• DEFINE: Introduces Pentland’s ‘tuning the network’ as a governing concept where computation replaces political life of community.
• XREF: connects to: Crowd psychology lowers individual responsibility and boosts influence susceptibility — Tim Wu, The Attention Merchants, 399

Broader Connections

• Crowd psychology lowers individual responsibility and boosts influence susceptibility #expands (0.75) — Tim Wu, The Attention Merchants, 399