Herding Societal Distrust

Surveillance Series

The Age of Surveillance Capitalism by Shoshana Zuboff, 2019, Excerpts

Societies that display low levels of interpersonal trust also tend to display low levels of trust toward legitimate authority; indeed, levels of trust toward the government have declined substantially in the US. The declaration of a “war on terror” legitimated every inclination to enshrine machine-produced certainty as the ultimate solution to societal uncertainty.

The state’s continuous demands for the intensification of surveillance capitalism’s production of instrumentarian power—expressed in the growth and elaboration of Big Other—is the preferred solution to social breakdown, mistrust, and uncertainty. The aim is the automation of society through tuning, herding, and conditioning people to produce preselected behaviors judged as desirable by the state and thus able to “preempt instability.”

Chinese users are rendered, classified, and queued up for prediction with every digital touch, and so are we. We are ranked on Uber, on eBay, on Facebook, and on many other web businesses, and those are only the rankings that we see. Chinese users are assigned a “character” score, whereas the US government urges the tech companies to train their algorithms for a “radicalism” score.

Totalistic rendering and control of all human behavior will serve civilization in a hyperconnected future, and there is no sign of hesitation to assert computational governance over the whole domain of human endeavor for the sake of a collective destiny.

The Bewildered Herd

Behavioral Modification Theorists

Surveillance Series

The Age of Surveillance Capitalism by Shoshana Zuboff, 2019, Excerpts

A storm of controversy made Skinner’s science of human behavior Beyond Freedom & Dignity an international best seller. The public rejected Skinner’s argument that there were cultural matters more important than preserving and extending individual freedom.

Pentland’s book, Social Physics, summons Skinner’s social vision into the twenty-first century. Both Skinner and Pentland believe in the authority of the utopianists to impose their plan. In Pentland’s view, Facebook already exemplifies these dynamics. Its contagion experiments reveal active mastery of the ability to manipulate human empathy and attachment with tuning techniques such as priming and suggestion.

In an article titled “The Death of Individuality,” Pentland insists that “instead of individual rationality, our society appears to be governed by a collective intelligence that comes from the surrounding flow of ideas and examples. It is time that we dropped the fiction of individuals as the unit of rationality and recognized that our rationality is largely determined by the surrounding social fabric.”

The Group Mind

Social Media

Surveillance Series

The Age of Surveillance Capitalism by Shoshana Zuboff, 2019, Excerpts

Social media is designed to engage and hold people of all ages, but it is principally molded to the psychological structure of adolescence and emerging adulthood, when one is naturally oriented toward the “others,” especially toward the rewards of group recognition, acceptance, belonging, and inclusion. Young people crave the hive, and Facebook gives it to them, but this time it’s owned and operated by surveillance capital and scientifically engineered.

It boasts detailed information on mood shifts among young people based on internal Facebook data, and it claims that Facebook’s prediction products can not only detect sentiment but also predict how emotions are communicated at different points during the week, matching each emotional phase with appropriate ad messaging for the maximum probability of guaranteed outcomes.

Today’s means of behavioral modification are aimed unabashedly at “us.” Everyone is swept up in this new market dragnet, including the psychodramas of ordinary, unsuspecting fourteen-year-olds approaching the weekend with anxiety. By monitoring posts, pictures, interactions, and Internet activity, Facebook can work out when young people feel stressed, defeated, overwhelmed, anxious, nervous, stupid, silly, useless, and a failure.

Elite Educational Path

Power Elite Series

The Power Elite by C. Wright Mills, 1956, Excerpts

The daughter of an old upper-class New York family, for example, is usually under the care of nurse and mother until she is four years of age, after which she is under the daily care of a governess who often speaks French as well as English. When she is six or seven, she goes to a private day school, perhaps Mis Chapin’s or Brearley. She is often driven to and from school by the family chauffeur and in the afternoons, after school, she is in the general care of the governess, who now spends most of her time with the younger children. When she is about fourteen she goes to boarding school, perhaps to St. Timothy’s in Maryland or Miss Porter’s or Westover in Connecticut. Then she may attend Finch Junior College of New York City and thus be ‘finished,’ or if she is to attend college proper, she will be enrolled in Bryn Mawr or Vassar or Wellesley or Smith or Bennington. She will marry soon after finishing school or college, and presumably begin to guide her own children through the same educational sequence.

The boy of this family, while under seven years of age, will follow a similar pattern. Then he too will go to day school and to prep school: St. Mark’s or St. Paul’s, Choate or Groton, Andover or Lawrenceville, Phillips Exeter or Hotchkiss. Then he will go to Princeton or Harvard, Yale or Dartmouth. As likely not, he will finish with a law school attached to one of these colleges.

Harvard or Yale or Princeton is not enough. It is the really exclusive prep school that counts, for that determines which of the ‘two Harvards’ one attends. That is why in the upper social classes, it does not by itself mean much merely to have a degree for an Ivy League college. That is assumed: the point is not Harvard, but which Harvard? By Harvard, one means Porcellian, Fly, or A.D.: by Yale, one means Zeta Psi or Fence or Delta Kappa Epsilon; by Princeton, Cottage, Tiger, Cap and Gown, or Ivy. It is the prestige of a properly certified secondary education followed by a proper club in a proper Ivy League college that is the standard admission ticket to the world of urban clubs and parties in any major city of the nation.

Harvard Porcellian Club - Social Network