Social media’s data selling parallels financial high-frequency trading

Evidence

Shoshana Zuboff’s (2019) work on surveillance capitalism is a particularly noteworthy and far-reaching recent intervention in these debates. Zuboff stresses that the growth of surveillance capitalism poses a serious threat to democracy, considering new technologies as forming a “global architecture of behaviour modification” (vii), spawned by the deregulatory forces of neoliberalism. This process takes place through the buying and selling of behavioral future predictions made on the behest of big tech, unbeknownst to most users. The use of ultra-high-speed algorithmic marketing is the digital industry equivalent of financial high-frequency trading—with social media platforms wielding highly complex machine-learning technologies to track, trace, and sell user data. — Aris Komporozos-Athanasiou, Speculative Communities, 182

Categorization

• XREF: Zuboff’s framework is the thesis the author is negating — the reader needs this baseline to understand the contrarian move at 183. — connects to: High frequency trading speed edges yield tens of billions in annual profits — Hartmut Rosa, Social Acceleration: A New Theory of…, 14