Today’s emotion surveillance differs in kind, not just scale, from old advertising

Evidence

This is not the first time that the unconscious mind has been targeted as an instrument of others’ aims. Propaganda and advertising have always been designed to appeal to unacknowledged fears and yearnings. These have relied more on art than science, using gross data or professional intuition for the purpose of mass communication. Those operations cannot be compared to the scientific application of today’s historic computational power to the micro-measured, continuous rendition of your more-or-less actual feelings. The new toolmakers do not intend to rob you of your inner life, only to surveil and exploit it. All they ask is to know more about you than you know about yourself. — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 885

Categorization

• QUESTION: Is the difference between old propaganda art and new computational micro-measurement genuinely a qualitative leap, or a rhetoric-loaded scaling claim worth stress-testing?
• XREF: connects to: Surveillance platforms weaponize empathy and belonging to herd behavior commercially — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 1492; Market forces redirected affective computing from empowerment into commercial surveillance — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 909; Emotion-detecting chips claim to classify twelve emotions across 64 trillion states — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 900

Broader Connections

• Surveillance platforms weaponize empathy and belonging to herd behavior commercially #expands (0.85) — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 1492
• Market forces redirected affective computing from empowerment into commercial surveillance #corroborates (0.80) — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 909