CHAPTER TEN MAI<E THEM DANCE But hear the morning's injured weeping and know why: Ramparts and souls have fallen; the will of the unjust Has never lacked an engine; still all princes must Employ the fairly-noble unifying lie. -W.H.AUDEN SONNETS FROM CHINA, XI 1. Economies of Action "The new power is action," a senior software engineer told me. "The intelli­ gence of the internet of thiQgs means that sensors can also be actuators." The director of software engineering for a company that is an important player in the "internet of things" added, "It's no longer simply about ubiquitous computing. Now the real aim is ubiquitous intervention, action, and control. The real power is that now you can modify real-time actions in the real world. Connected smart sensors can register and analyze any kind of behavior and then actually figure out how to change it. Real-time analytics translate into real-time action." The scientists and engineers I interviewed call this new ca­ pability "actuation," and they describe it as the critical though largely undis­ cussed turning point in the evolution of the apparatus of ubiquity. This actuation capability defines a new phase of the prediction imperative that emphasizes economies of action. This phase represents the completion of the new means of behavior modification, a decisive and necessary evolution of the surveillance capitalist "means of production" toward a more complex, iterative, and muscular operational system. It is a critical achievement in the race to guaranteed outcomes. Under surveillance capitalism the objectives 293 · 294 PART II: THE ADVANCE OF SURVEILLANCE CAPITALISM and operations of automated behavioral modification are designed and trolled by companies to meet their own revenue and growth 0 one senior engineer told me, Sensors are used to modify people's behavior just as easily as they modify device behavior. There are many great things we can do with the internet of things, like lowering the heat in all the houses on your street so that the transformer is not overloaded, or optimizing an entire industrial operation. But at the individual level, it also means the power to take actions that can override what you are doing or even put you on a path you did not choose. The scientists and engineers whom I interviewed identified three approaches to economies of action, each one aimed at achieving modification. The first two I call «tuning" and «herding." The third is familiar as what behavioral psychologists refer to as «conditioning." gies that produce economies of action vary according to the methods which these approaches are combined and the salience of each. «Tuning" occurs in a variety of ways. It may involve subliminal cues signed to subtly shape the flow of behavior at the precise time and place maximally efficient influence. Another kind of tuning involves what ioral economists Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein call the «nudge," they define as «any aspect of a choice architecture that alters people's ior in a predictable way."! The term choice architecture refers to the ways which situations are already structured to channel attention and shape In some cases these architectures are intentionally designed to elicit behavior, such as a classroom in which all the seats face the teacher or an on­ line business that requires you to click through many obscure pages in order to opt out of its tracking cookies. The use cf this term is another way of say­ ing in behaviorist language that social situations are always already thick with tuning interventions, most of which operate outside our awareness. Behavioral economists argue a worldview based on the notion that hu­ man mentation is frail and flawed, leading to irrational choices that fa il to adequately consider the wider structure of alternatives. Thaler and Sunstein have encouraged governments to actively design nudges that adequatelY Make Them Dance 295 individual choice making toward outcomes that align with their in­ sts as perceived by experts. One classic example favored by Thaler and tere ' tein is the cafeteria manager who nudges students to healthier food sun S by prominently displaying the fruit salad in front of the pudding; an- other is the automatic renewal of health insurance policies as a way of pro­ tecting individuals who overlook the need for new approvals at the end of each year. surveillance capitalists adapted many of the highly contestable assump- of behavioral economists as one cover story with which to legitimate their practical commitment to a unilateral commercial program of behav­ ior modification. The twist here is that nudges are intended to encourage choices that accrue to the architect, not to the individual. The result is data scientists trained on economies of action who regard it as perfectly nor­ mal to master the art and science of the "digital nudge" for the sake of their company's commercial interests. For example, the chief data scientist for a national drugstore chain described how his company designs automatic dig­ ital nudges that subtly push people toward the specific behaviors favored by the company: "you can make people do things with this technology. Even if it's just 5% of people, you've made 5% of people do an action they otherwise wouldn't have done, so to some extent there is an element of the user's loss of self-control." "Herding" is a second approach that relies on controlling key elements in a person's immediate context. The uncontract is an example of a herding technique. Shutting down a car's engine irreversibly changes the driver's im­ mediate context, herding her out the car door. Herding enables remote or­ chestration of the human situation, foreclosing action alternatives and thus moving behavior along a path of heightened probability that approximates certainty. "We are learning how to write the music, and then we let the mu­ sic make them dance," an "internet of things" software developer explains, adding, We can engineer the context around a particular behavior and force change that way. Context-aware data allow us to tie together your emotions, your cognitive functions, your vital signs, etcetera. We can know if you shouldn't be driving, and we can just shut your car 296 PART II: THE ADVANCE OF SURVEILLANCE CAPITALISM down. We can tell the fridge, "Hey, lock up because he shouldn't be eating:' or we tell the TV to shut off and make you get some sleep, Or the chair to start shaking because you shouldn't be sitting so long, Or the faucet to turn on because you need to drink more water. "Conditioning" is a well-known approach to inducing behavior primarily associated with the famous Harvard behaviorist B. F. Skinner. argued that behavior modification should mimic the evolutionary in which naturally occurring behaviors are "selected" for success by mental conditions. Instead of the earlier, more simplistic model of response, associated with behaviorists such as Watson and Pavlov, interpolated a third variable: "reinforcement." In his laboratory work mice and pigeons, Skinner learned how to observe a range of naturally curring behaviors in the experimental animal and then reinforce the action, or "operant," that he wanted the animal to reproduce. Ultimately, mastered intricate deSigns or "schedules" of reinforcement that could shape precise behavioral routines. Skinner called the application of reinforcements to shape specific haviors "operant conditioning." His larger project was known as modification" or "behavioral engineering," in which behavior is "'VJlIL1JlIUIJ U~lV I shaped to amplify some actions at the expense of others. In the end the pi­ geon learns, for example, to peck a button twice in order to receive a pellet grain. The mouse learns his way through a complicated maze and back again. Skinner imagined a pervasive "technology of behavior" that would enable the application of such methods across entire human populations. As the chief data scientist for a much -admired Silicon V alley education company told me, "Conditioning at scale is essential to the new science of massively engineered human behavior." He believes that smartphones, wear­ able devices, and the larger assembly of always-on networked nodes allow his company to modify and manage a substantial swath of its users' behavior. As digital signals monitor and track a person's daily activities, the company gradually masters the schedule of reinforcements- rewards, recognition, or praise that can reliably produce the specific user behaviors that the company selects for dominance: Make Them Dance 297 The goal of everything we do is to change people's actual behavior at scale. We want to figure out the construction of changing a person's behavior, and then we want to change how lots of people are making their day-to-day decisions. When people use our app, we can capture their behaviors and identify good and bad [ones]. Then we develop "treatments" or "data pellets" that select good behaviors. We can test how actionable our cues are for them and how profitable certain behaviors are for us. Although it is still possible to imagine automated behavioral modifica­ without surveillance capitalism, it is not possible to imagine surveillance without the marriage of behavior modification and the techno­ means to automate its application. This marriage is essential to econ­ of action. For example, one can imagine a fitness tracker, a car, or a whose data and operational controls are accessible exclusively to owners for the purposes of helping them to exercise more often, drive , and eat healthily. But as we have already seen in so many domains, the of surveillance capitalism has obliterated the idea of the simple feedback characteristic of the behavioral value reinvestment cycle. In the end, it's the devices; it's Max Weber's "economic orientation," now determined by _ .• "'"'U"....