Platforms steer how people value themselves through reputation metrics and gamified data extraction.

Evidence

Many of the accepted infrastructures for valuing people today are managed by platforms and are driven by those platforms’ incitements to action and the types of data they do or do not value. Insofar as we care about our reputation (and few people don’t), we are continuously oriented to what counts as reputation for platforms. … Such soft incitements are formalized in marketers’ strategy of gamification. Gamification makes data extraction playful but far from formal—as with games such as Pokémon Go whose playing requires the revealing of location and other data. Gamification, as the president of loyalty marketer Points puts it, creates “a relationship of exchange where consumers are … incentivized to share more of themselves: their time, their attention, their information, and ultimately their loyalty.” — Nick Couldry & Ulises A. Mejias, The Costs of Connection, 406

Categorization

• DEFINE: Gamification is defined here as soft incitement that makes data extraction playful, extending the book’s central concept into a concrete mechanism.
• XREF: Connects to the attention/surveillance school’s notion of engagement extraction — gamification is where the two paradigms visibly overlap. — connects to: Platforms extract free labor from users in exchange for recognition and perks; Digital platforms hijack life into data whose insights are sold back to us; Metrics become socially interpreted measures of personal self-worth — Alice E. Marwick, Status Update: Celebrity, Publicity,…, 217 (+6 more)
• QUESTION: Does gamified extraction prove ‘data colonialism’ more compelling than attention-extraction as a frame, or are the two descriptions of the same mechanism?

Broader Connections

• Metrics become socially interpreted measures of personal self-worth #expands (0.90) — Alice E. Marwick, Status Update, 217
• Platforms extract behavioral surplus from human activity to predict and modify it. #expands (0.85) — , The Braided Reading EPUB, 809
• Surveillance platforms extract behavioral data from users and sell predictions to advertisers #expands (0.80) — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 297
• Self-tracking practices reproduce data capitalism rather than resist it #qualifies (0.75) — Nick Couldry & Ulises A. Mejias, The Costs of Connection, 1138