Surveillance capitalist experiments exploit knowledge asymmetry to engineer user behavior for profit

Evidence

What follows now are two distinct narratives of surveillance capitalists as “experimenters” who leverage their asymmetries of knowledge to impose their will on the unsuspecting human subjects who are their users. The experimental insights accumulated through their one-way mirrors are critical to constructing, fine-tuning, and exploring the capabilities of each firm’s for-profit means of behavioral modification. In Facebook’s user experiments and in the augmented-reality game Pokémon Go (imagined and incubated at Google), we see the commercial means of behavioral modification evolving before our eyes. Both combine the components of economies of action and the techniques of tuning, herding, and conditioning in startling new ways that expose the Greeks secreted deep in the belly of the Trojan horse: the economic orientation obscured behind the veil of the digital. — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 934

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the reader’s broader reading on surveillance capitalism as the defining account of the digital economy — this frames the cases that follow in chapters 9-10. — connects to: Social software can promote inequality rather than counter it. — Alice E. Marwick, Status Update: Celebrity, Publicity,…, 19; Herd attention results from profit logic, not algorithms themselves — Yves Citton, The Ecology of Attention, 223; Framing technology as autonomous disguises who profits from data extraction — Nick Couldry & Ulises A. Mejias, The Costs of Connection: How Data Is…, 511 (+15 more)

Broader Connections

• Behavioral surplus extraction forms the core logic of surveillance capitalism #expands (0.90) — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 70
• Surveillance capitalists deliberately conceal how their platforms monetize user behavior #expands (0.85) — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 1411
• Surveillance capitalism rests on extreme inequalities of knowledge and power #expands (0.85) — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 45
• Surveillance capitalism operates through Big Other to engineer behavior rather than souls #expands (0.80) — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 1196
• Surveillance capitalism subordinates earlier user reciprocities to derivative extraction for others’ aims #expands (0.80) — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 298
• Surveillance capitalism exploits the human hunger for recognition #expands (0.75) — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 797