The Age of Surveillance Capitalism

by Shoshana Zuboff

Personality analysis for commercial advantage is built on behavioral surplus—the so-called meta-data or mid-level metrics—honed and tested by researchers and destined to foil anyone who thinks that she is in control of the “amount” of personal information that she reveals in social media. In the name of, for example, affordable car insurance, we must be coded as conscientious, agreeable, and open. This is not easily faked because the surplus retrieved for analysis is necessarily opaque to us. We are not scrutinized for substance but for form. The price you are offered does not derive from what you write about but how you write it. It is not what is in your sentences but in their length and complexity, not what you list but that you list, not the picture but the choice of filter and degree of saturation, not what you disclose but how you share or fail to, not where you make plans to see your friends but how you do so: a casual “later” or a precise time and place? Exclamation marks and adverb choices operate as revelatory and potentially damaging signals of your self.