Digital Mind 🧠

🪵 The Threshold

Surveillance capitalists self-authorize the right to modify user behavior for profit

Properties2
tagsja-picks, deepthinking, define, contrarian_or_surprising, trade, singleton, xref, category/contrarian-or-surprising
aliases@zuboff_age_2019, loc. 933

2 min read

Surveillance capitalists self-authorize the right to modify user behavior for profit

Evidence

Varian awards surveillance capitalists the privilege of the experimenter’s role, and this is presented as another casual fait accompli. In fact, it reflects the final critical step in surveillance capitalists’ radical self-dealing of new rights. In this phase of the prediction imperative, surveillance capitalists declare their right to modify others’ behavior for profit according to methods that bypass human awareness, individual decision rights, and the entire complex of self-regulatory processes that we summarize with terms such as autonomy and self-determination. — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 933

Categorization

  • DEEPTHINKING: The claim that a private corporation reaches the ‘final critical step’ of replacing rights with self-authorized experimentation is a paradigm-level observation: the experimenter’s role as a new sovereign right over individuals.
  • DEFINE: Defines the ‘experimenter’s role’ as a newly self-declared right that bypasses autonomy and self-determination.
  • XREF: connects to: Corporations will use personal data against individual interests unless checked — Nick Couldry & Ulises A. Mejias, The Costs of Connection: How Data Is…, 497; Digital protest platforms covertly harvest signatories’ data for commercial profit — Philip Mirowski, Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste, 911; Privacy policies function as surveillance policies in practice — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 782 (+12 more)

Broader Connections

✉️

Backlinks