Mass behavior modification was denounced decades ago but now passes with little resistance
Evidence
The evidence of our psychic numbing is that only a few decades ago US society denounced mass behavior-modification techniques as unacceptable threats to individual autonomy and the democratic order. Today the same practices meet little resistance or even discussion as they are routinely and pervasively deployed in the march toward surveillance revenues. — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 70
Categorization
- SEED: Angle: a genealogy of how a practice once considered a moral outrage — mass behavior modification — got quietly normalized as routine digital commerce, and what that says about our ethical baselines migrating.
- XREF: connects to: Contemporary power struggles now turn on engineered behavior modification, not class relations — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 969; The 1970s debate over behavior control marks a social discontinuity with the present — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 1014; 1970s congressional scrutiny drove behavior modification out of civilian institutions — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 1020 (+5 more)
Broader Connections
- Racialized control techniques remain available because public resistance is weak
#corroborates(0.85) — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race, 485 - Skinner envisioned a population-scale technology of behavioral control that rejected freedom
#corroborates(0.80) — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 1012 - Repetitive standardized mass culture automatizes reactions and weakens individual resistance.
#corroborates(0.78) — Theodor W. Adorno, The Culture Industry, 213 - The behavioral transmission view of communication became exhausted and academic by the 1970s
#corroborates(0.75) — James W. Carey, Communication as Culture- Essays on…, 177