Pokémon Go pioneered automated mass conditioning of behavior into prediction markets

Evidence

At its zenith in the summer of 2016, Pokémon Go was a surveillance capitalist’s dream come true, fusing scale, scope, and actuation; yielding continuous sources of behavioral surplus; and providing fresh data to elaborate the mapping of interior, exterior, public, and private spaces. Most important, it provided a living laboratory for telestimulation at scale as the game’s owners learned how to automatically condition and herd collective behavior, directing it toward real-time constellations of behavioral futures markets, with all of this accomplished just beyond the rim of individual awareness. In Hanke’s approach, economies of action would be achieved through the dynamics of a game. — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 979

Categorization

• XREF: Extends the telestimulation and behavioral futures market framework from earlier chapters into a concrete consumer example. — connects to: Games like Pokémon Go serve as experimental prototypes for broad behavioral modification infrastructure — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 1002; Pokémon Go functioned as a covert surveillance-capitalism apparatus to herd players toward commercial locations — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 1000; Pokémon Go directs behavior modification toward targets players never consciously perceive — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 985 (+3 more)
• SEED: Angle: ‘the game disguised as entertainment was actually the first mass behavioral actuation machine’ — lays bare how playful consumer tech advanced surveillance capitalism’s core project.

Broader Connections

• Pokémon Go directs behavior modification toward targets players never consciously perceive #corroborates (0.90) — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 985
• Pokémon Go functioned as a covert surveillance-capitalism apparatus to herd players toward commercial locations #expands (0.85) — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 1000
• Games like Pokémon Go serve as experimental prototypes for broad behavioral modification infrastructure #corroborates (0.82) — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 1002
• Pokémon Go’s location tracking aimed to compile one of the most detailed social graphs #corroborates (0.78) — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 996
• Markets in future behavior emerged from Google’s predictive analysis of data exhaust #qualifies (0.72) — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 1066
• Complex behavior emerges from rewarding successive small approximations #expands (0.72) — Brian Christian, The Alignment Problem, 660