Surveillance Capitalism: Weaponizing The Web To Manipulate Behavior
Surveillance Capitalism:
Weaponizing The Web To Manipulate Behavior
By tyler-durden Wed,
01/08/2020 - 22:05
Over the past two
decades, an entirely new economic model has taken hold, seemingly right
under our noses.
Whereas the Internet and
digital technologies once promised to liberate humanity through
disintermediation and shared connections, now they have been turned into
tools for behavioral manipulation and exploitation.
As we enter a new decade, we
are also entering a new era of political economy. Over the centuries,
capitalism has evolved through a number of stages, from industrial to
managerial to financial capitalism. Now we are entering the age of
“surveillance capitalism.”
Under surveillance
capitalism, people’s lived experiences are unilaterally claimed by private
companies and translated into proprietary data flows. Some of these data
are used to improve products and services. The rest are considered a
“behavioral surplus” and valued for their rich predictive signals.
These predictive data
are shipped to new-age factories of machine intelligence where they are
computed into highly profitable prediction products that anticipate your
current and future choices. Prediction products are then traded in what I
call “behavioral futures markets,” where surveillance capitalists sell
certainty to their business customers.
Google’s “clickthrough rate”
was the first globally successful prediction product, and its ad markets were
the first to trade in human futures. Already, surveillance capitalists have
grown immensely wealthy from these trading operations, and ever more
companies across nearly every economic sector have shown an eagerness to lay
bets on our future behavior.
The competitive dynamics of
these new markets reveal surveillance capitalism’s economic imperatives.
First, machine intelligence
demands a lot of data: economies of scale.
Second, the best predictions
also require varieties of data: economies of scope. This drove the extension of
surplus capture beyond likes and clicks into the offline world: your jogging
gait and pace; your breakfast conversation; your hunt for a parking space; your
face, voice, personality, and emotions.
In a third phase of
competitive intensity, surveillance capitalists discovered that the most
predictive data come from intervening in human action to coax, tune, herd, and
modify behavior in the direction of guaranteed outcomes.
This shift from knowledge to
power transforms technology from a means of production to a global means of
behavioral modification in order to achieve “economies of action.”
Comments
Post a Comment