Social categories like class and race may be replaced by behavior-based demographic prediction

Evidence

Pentland insists that the “old” social categories of status, class, education, race, gender, and generation are obsolete, as irrelevant as the energy, food, and water systems that he wants to replace. Those categories describe societies through the lens of history, power, and politics, but Pentland prefers “populations” to societies, “statistics” to meaning, and “computation” to law. He sees the “stratification of the population” coded not by race, income, occupation, or gender but rather by “behavior patterns” that produce “behavior subgroups” and a new “behavior demographics” that can predict disease, financial risk, consumer preferences, and political views with “between 5 and 10 times the accuracy” of the standard measures. — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 1363

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to Foucault’s biopolitics and to predictive analytics narratives in tech evangelism; also echoes the ‘behavioral modification’ logic Zuboff says Skinner paved. — connects to: Human categorization is a universal navigational tool for social worlds; Social prediction depends on social rationality, not just method — Martin Jay, The Dialectical Imagination: A History…, 300; ZIP-code clustering replaced single-variable demographics as the defining marketing category — Tim Wu, The Attention Merchants, 605
• SEED: Angle: ‘behavior demographics’ as a claimed replacement for sociology — what gets lost when prediction outranks understanding in how we describe populations.

Broader Connections

• Human categorization is a universal navigational tool for social worlds #expands (0.80)
• Social prediction depends on social rationality, not just method #qualifies (0.72) — Martin Jay, The Dialectical Imagination, 300