Facebook’s surplus is aimed at solving one problem: how and when to intervene in the state of play that is your daily life in order to modify your behavior and thus sharply increase the predictability of your actions now, soon, and later. The challenge for surveillance capitalists is to learn how to do this effectively, automatically, and, therefore, economically, as a former Facebook product manager writes: Experiments are run on every user at some point in their tenure on the site. Whether that is seeing different size ad copy, or different marketing messages, or different call-to-action
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