Surveillance capitalism’s closed loops suffocate the inwardness enabling moral judgment
Evidence
What we witness here is a bet-the-farm commitment to the socialization and normalization of instrumentarian power for the sake of surveillance revenues. Just as Pentland stipulated, these closed loops are imposed outside the realm of politics and individual volition. They move in stealth, crafting their effects at the level of automatic psychological responses and tipping the self-other balance toward the pseudo-harmonies of the hive mind. In this process, the inwardness that is the necessary source of autonomous action and moral judgment suffers and suffocates. These are the preparatory steps toward the death of individuality that Pentland advocates. — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 1494
Categorization
- DEEPTHINKING: A dense causal-evaluative claim: stealth tuning operates below politics and volition, and systematically degrades the very inwardness that grounds autonomy and moral judgment — dense enough to sit with.
- XREF: Builds on Zuboff’s earlier distinction between instrumentarian power and totalitarian power, and on Pentland’s advocacy of behavioral control cited in prior chapters. — connects to: Automated surveillance threatens the open-ended self-transformative capacity that defines selfhood — Nick Couldry & Ulises A. Mejias, The Costs of Connection: How Data Is…, 489; Surveillance capitalism rewards ‘boundarylessness’ to extract predictive surplus from inner life — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 903; Surveillance capitalism’s behavioral modification creates heteronomous individuals contrary to democratic ideals — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 1003 (+6 more)
Broader Connections
- Surveillance capitalism threatens the inward capacities that sustain social bonds
#corroborates(0.90) — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 1566 - Surveillance capitalism aims to produce guaranteed outcomes rather than impose behavioral norms
#expands(0.85) — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 629 - Surveillance capitalism constitutes a privatized market-based collectivism
#qualifies(0.70) — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 1603