Market forces redirected affective computing from empowerment into commercial surveillance

Evidence

Picard did not foresee the market forces that would transform the rendition of emotion into for-profit surplus: means to others’ ends. That her vision is made manifest in thousands of activities should be a triumph, but it is diminished by the fact that so many of those activities are now bound to the commercial surveillance project. Each failure to establish bearings contributes to habituation, normalization, and ultimately legitimation. Subordinated to the larger aims of surveillance capitalism, the thrust of the affective project changed as if distorted in a fun-house mirror. — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 909

Categorization

• XREF: Builds directly on earlier chapters’ core claim that surveillance capitalism co-opts technologies meant for other purposes into behavioral surplus extraction. — connects to: Continuous classroom monitoring is marketed as an empowering selling point — Nick Couldry & Ulises A. Mejias, The Costs of Connection: How Data Is…, 535; Smart-home IoT devices enroll consumers in surveillance-based markets without knowledge or consent — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 751; Today’s emotion surveillance differs in kind, not just scale, from old advertising — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 885 (+9 more)

Broader Connections

• Surveillance capitalism mines intimate personality and emotional data for profit #corroborates (0.90) — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 624
• Surveillance platforms weaponize empathy and belonging to herd behavior commercially #expands (0.85) — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 1492
• Surveillance capitalism exploits both extraction and our voluntary surrender via interfaces #corroborates (0.80) — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 734
• Surveillance capitalism moves from predicting behavior to actively shaping it in real time #expands (0.80) — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 481
• Automated surveillance threatens the open-ended self-transformative capacity that defines selfhood #complicates (0.75) — Nick Couldry & Ulises A. Mejias, The Costs of Connection, 489