Digital Mind 🧠

🪵 The Threshold

Surveillance capitalism moves from predicting behavior to actively shaping it in real time

Properties2
tagsja-picks, define, xref, contrarian_or_surprising, trade, corroborated, category/contrarian-or-surprising
aliases@zuboff_age_2019, loc. 481, @zuboff_age_2019, loc. 1071, @zuboff_age_2019, loc. 1072

4 min read

Surveillance capitalism moves from predicting behavior to actively shaping it in real time

Evidence

In 2016, for example, the corporation introduced a new Maps app feature called “Driving Mode” that suggests destinations and travel times without users even selecting where they want to go. If you searched for a hammer online, then “Driving Mode” can send you to a hardware store when you buckle up your seat belt. … Predictions about where and why a person might spend money are derived from Google’s exclusive access to behavior surplus and its equally exclusive analytic capabilities: “Eat here.” “Buy this.” Google’s surplus analysis can predict that you are likely to buy an expensive woolen suit, and its real-time location data can trigger the proprietor or advertiser’s real-time prompt, matched to your profile and delivered at the very moment that you are within sight of the flannels, tweeds, and cashmeres. Push and pull, suggest, nudge, cajole, shame, seduce: Google wants to be your copilot for life itself. Each human response to each commercial prompt yields more data to refine into better prediction products. The prompts themselves are bought and paid for in a novel iteration of Google’s online ad markets: real-time, real-world trading in behavioral futures. Your future. — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 481

In a third phase of competitive intensity, surveillance capitalists discovered the necessity of economies of action based on new methods that go beyond tracking, capturing, analyzing, and predicting behavior in order to intervene in the state of play and actively shape behavior at the source. The result is that the means of production are subordinated to an elaborate new means of behavioral modification, which relies upon a variety of machine processes, techniques, and tactics (tuning, herding, conditioning) to shape individual, group, and population behavior in ways that continuously improve their approximation to guaranteed outcomes. Just as industrial capitalism was driven to the continuous intensification of the means of production, so surveillance capitalists are now locked in a cycle of continuous intensification of the means of behavioral modification. — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 1071

Surveillance capitalists’ interests have shifted from using automated machine processes to know about your behavior to using machine processes to shape your behavior according to their interests. In other words, this decade-and-a-half trajectory has taken us from automating information flows about you to automating you. — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 1072

Categorization

  • DEFINE: Defines the shift from prediction to modification (‘push’ technology) that becomes central to the third movement of surveillance capitalism
  • XREF: Parallels Marx’s industrial-capitalism analysis of the means of production; Zuboff deliberately maps onto it. — connects to: Self-tracking practices reproduce data capitalism rather than resist it — Nick Couldry & Ulises A. Mejias, The Costs of Connection: How Data Is…, 1138; Google Maps marked surveillance’s shift from knowledge to influence and control — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 480; Surveillance capitalism continuously intensifies the means of behavioral modification — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 37 (+15 more)
  • corroborated: 3 independent passages support this claim — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 481; Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 1071; Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 1072

Broader Connections

✉️

Backlinks