Shoshana Zuboff

Behaviour is taken as raw material, refined into prediction products, and sold. Once you are selling predictions, the shortest route to accuracy is intervention.

The mechanism

Zuboff's term is behavioural surplus: the data exhaust left over once a service has what it needs to function. Your search returns results with a fraction of what your search reveals. The remainder is the asset.

Refined, that surplus becomes a prediction product sold to whoever wants to know what you will do. And the competitive pressure runs in one direction: a prediction is more valuable the more certain it is, so the incentive is to stop forecasting behaviour and start nudging it.

The difference from the panopticon

Foucault's prisoner behaves because he might be watched and cannot check. The watching does the work by being felt.

Here the watching is not felt at all. There is no tower, no uncertainty, no sense of being observed. That is the update this project needs, and it is why Deleuze's modulation describes the present better than enclosure does.

Read next to the behavioural state, where the same technique appears with a public budget and published trials.

Serious objections

• Criticized for technological determinism, and for treating one advertising business model as a total civilizational rupture rather than a phase of it.
• The claim that behavioural futures markets reliably shape behaviour outruns the published evidence on how well targeting actually works.
• Political economists argue the book gives capitalism itself a clean bill of health by locating the problem in a deviant new form of it.