Surveillance platforms weaponize empathy and belonging to herd behavior commercially
Evidence
Its operations are designed to exploit the human inclination toward empathy, belonging, and acceptance. The system tunes the pitch of our behavior with the rewards and punishments of social pressure, herding the human heart toward confluence as a means to others’ commercial ends. — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 1492
Categorization
- XREF: Echoes the engineered social pressure discussed throughout the chapter on Pentland’s instrumentarianism; also resonates with Friis Chapelle’s ‘social tuning’ literature and hedonic/utilitarian well-being research. — connects to: Large social platforms function as aggregators of niche tracking services — Alice E. Marwick, Status Update: Celebrity, Publicity,…, 542; Today’s emotion surveillance differs in kind, not just scale, from old advertising — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 885; Market forces redirected affective computing from empowerment into commercial surveillance — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 909 (+11 more)
Broader Connections
- Surveillance capitalism exploits the human hunger for recognition
#corroborates(0.85) — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 797 - Surveillance capitalism mines intimate personality and emotional data for profit
#expands(0.80) — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 624 - Surveillance platforms extract behavioral data from users and sell predictions to advertisers
#expands(0.80) — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 297 - Surveillance capitalism moves from predicting behavior to actively shaping it in real time
#expands(0.80) — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 481 - Being watched cues reliably boost prosocial behavior and suppress cheating
#qualifies(0.75)