Social quantification lets corporations profit from participation without commodity purchase

Evidence

Problem 1: As inequality increases and the majority of people have less money to spend, capitalism needs to find new ways to exploit them that don’t involve buying things. Wealth is becoming less evenly distributed, which means most of it is accumulating at the top while the majority of people experience a loss of wealth. If people buy fewer and fewer things, this can become a problem for capitalism. Fortunately (for capitalism), social quantification introduces a new model in which people can generate profit for corporations simply by participating in social activities, without having to buy commodities. — Nick Couldry & Ulises A. Mejias, The Costs of Connection, 166

Categorization

• XREF: This is the extractive-participation model that distinguishes the data colonialism frame from attention-economy accounts focused on ad-supported attention. — connects to: Social media participation constitutes unpaid labor from which platforms extract value — Alice E. Marwick, Status Update: Celebrity, Publicity,…, 505; Automation-triggered falling profit rates push capital toward social quantification as a new revenue stream — Nick Couldry & Ulises A. Mejias, The Costs of Connection: How Data Is…, 167; Digital assistants convert inner life into calculable behavioral surplus for others’ profit — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 796 (+4 more)
• SEED: Essay angle: the claim that platforms monetize participation itself, not attention, is the clearest statement of what makes data colonialism a genuinely rival frame to the attention economy.

Broader Connections

• Automation-triggered falling profit rates push capital toward social quantification as a new revenue stream #corroborates (0.85) — Nick Couldry & Ulises A. Mejias, The Costs of Connection, 167
• Digital assistants convert inner life into calculable behavioral surplus for others’ profit #exemplifies (0.82) — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 796
• Falling manufacturing profits drove capitalism toward data extraction via platform monopolies #corroborates (0.75) — Nick Srnicek, Platform Capitalism, 17