Platforms’ initial promise of freedom masks instrumentarian behavioral engineering

Evidence

Facebook entered the world bypassing old institutional boundaries, offering us freedom to connect and express ourselves at will. It is impossible to say what the Facebook experience might have been had the company chosen a path that did not depend upon surveillance revenues. Instead, we confront the sudden accretion of an instrumentarian power that spins our society in an unanticipated direction. Facebook’s applied utopistics are a prototype of an instrumentarian future, showcasing feats of behavioral engineering that groom populations for the rigors of instrumentarianism’s coercive harmonies. — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 1492

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to Zuboff’s own surveillance capitalism framework and Pentland’s instrumentarian model discussed earlier in this same text. — connects to: Games achieve behavioral engineering through three tiers of dynamics, mechanics, and components — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 983; Behavioral engineering once reviled is now openly embraced by tech leadership — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 1266; Instrumented workplaces act as testbeds for extending instrumentarian control to all of society — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 1356 (+6 more)

Broader Connections

• Instrumentarian power arises from converging surveillance capabilities and monetized behavioral surplus #expands (0.85) — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 1214
• Platforms extract behavioral surplus from human activity to predict and modify it. #expands (0.82) — , The Braided Reading EPUB, 809
• Programming perception through technical devices leads to programming behavior #expands (0.80) — Yves Citton, The Ecology of Attention, 210
• Behavioral engineered self-control masks society’s ultimate control over individuals #complicates (0.75) — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 1386