Pokémon Go functioned as a covert surveillance-capitalism apparatus to herd players toward commercial locations

Evidence

The genius of Pokémon Go was to transform the game you see into a higher-order game of surveillance capitalism, a game about a game. The players who took the city as their board, roaming its parks and pizzerias, unwittingly constituted a wholly different kind of human game board for this second and more consequential game. The players in this other real game could not be found in the clot of enthusiasts waving their phones at the edge of David’s lawn. In the real game, prediction products take the form of protocols that impose forms of telestimulation intended to prod and herd people across real-world terrains to spend their real-world money in the real-world commercial establishments of Niantic’s flesh-and-blood behavioral futures markets. — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 1000

Categorization

• DEFINE: Defines ‘telestimulation’ and the double-game structure as surveillance capitalism’s operative method.
• XREF: Echoes the broader thesis of surveillance capitalism as a ‘means of behavioral modification,’ connecting to the book’s foundational chapters. — connects to: Pokémon’s cuteness aesthetic reconciled Japanese ambivalences about capitalism and childhood. — Max Haiven, Cultures of Financialization, 352; Pokémon Go pioneered automated mass conditioning of behavior into prediction markets — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 979; Surveillance-based mapping technology directly spawned the mobile game industry — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 976 (+7 more)

Broader Connections

• Games like Pokémon Go serve as experimental prototypes for broad behavioral modification infrastructure #expands (0.90) — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 1002
• Google’s mapping games served as test beds for expanding surveillance capitalism into physical space #corroborates (0.85) — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 472
• Competition drives surveillance capitalism from the virtual into the physical world #expands (0.80) — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 1070
• Surveillance-capitalism theory understates what digital platforms actually do #exemplifies (0.75) — Yanis Varoufakis, Technofeudalism, 905