Surveillance capitalism declares human experience a fourth fictional commodity renamed as behavior.
Evidence
Today’s owners of surveillance capital have declared a fourth fictional commodity expropriated from the experiential realities of human beings whose bodies, thoughts, and feelings are as virgin and blameless as nature’s once-plentiful meadows and forests before they fell to the market dynamic. In this new logic, human experience is subjugated to surveillance capitalism’s market mechanisms and reborn as “behavior.” These behaviors are rendered into data, ready to take their place in a numberless queue that feeds the machines for fabrication into predictions and eventual exchange in the new behavioral futures markets. — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 316
Categorization
- DEFINE: Defines the central mechanism: raw experience is reborn as behavior data routed into behavioral futures markets.
- XREF: Explicitly echoes Polanyi’s fictional commodities (land, labor, money) — the foundational comparison for surveillance capitalism. — connects to: Skinner anticipated surveillance capitalism’s practice of rendering private life into behavioral data — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 1174; Surveillance capitalism continuously intensifies the means of behavioral modification — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 37; Surveillance capitalism extracts behavioral surplus to predict and modify behavior. — , The Braided Reading EPUB: 5-Year…, 73 (+1 more)
Broader Connections
- Skinner anticipated surveillance capitalism’s practice of rendering private life into behavioral data
#expands(0.90) — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 1174 - Surveillance capitalism continuously intensifies the means of behavioral modification
#expands(0.85) — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 37 - Surveillance capitalism extracts behavioral surplus to predict and modify behavior.
#expands(0.80) — , The Braided Reading EPUB, 73 - Surveillance capitalism’s prediction imperative modifies behavior using secret means beyond awareness.
#expands(0.75) — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 612