Regulating Facebook would push its practices into covert opacity rather than end them.

Evidence

Facebook’s persistence warns us again of the dispossession cycle’s stubborn march. Facebook had publicly acknowledged and apologized for its overt experimental incursions into behavior modification and emotional manipulation, and it promised adaptations to curb or mitigate these practices. Meanwhile, a new threshold of intimate life had been breached. Facebook’s potential mastery of emotional manipulation became discussable and even taken for granted as habituation set in. From Princeton’s Fiske to critic Grimmelmann and supporter Meyer, the experts believed that if Facebook’s activities were to be forced into a new regulatory regime, the corporation would merely continue in secret. The Australian documents opened one door on these covert practices, suggesting the completion of the cycle with the redirection of action into clandestine zones protected by opacity and indecipherability, just as these scholars had anticipated. — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 960

Categorization

• SEED: Angle for an essay on the dispossession cycle and why regulation of surveillance capitalism may simply drive practices underground rather than curbing them.
• XREF: The regulation-pushes-behavior-underground logic echoes Ehrlichman’s drug-war critique and offshore-jurisdiction dynamics in financial crime literature.