The Age of Surveillance Capitalism

by Shoshana Zuboff

A document acquired by the Australian press in May 2017 would eventually reveal this fact. Three years after the publication of the contagion study, the Australian broke the story on a confidential twenty-three-page Facebook document written by two Facebook executives in 2017 and aimed at the company’s Australian and New Zealand advertisers. The report depicted the corporation’s systems for gathering “psychological insights” on 6.4 million high school and tertiary students as well as young Australians and New Zealanders already in the workforce. The Facebook document detailed the many ways in which the corporation uses its stores of behavioral surplus to pinpoint the exact moment at which a young person needs a “confidence boost” and is therefore most vulnerable to a specific configuration of advertising cues and nudges: “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.’”