Facebook publicly denied these practices, but Antonio Garcia-Martinez, a former Facebook product manager and author of a useful account of Silicon Valley titled Chaos Monkeys, described in the Guardian the routine application of such practices and accused the corporation of “lying through their teeth.” He concluded, “The hard reality is that Facebook will never try to limit such use of their data unless the public uproar reaches such a crescendo as to be un-mutable.” Certainly the public challenge to Facebook’s insertion of itself into the emotional lives of its users, as expressed in the contagion study, and its pledge to self-regulate did not quell its commercial interest in users’ emotions or the corporation’s compulsion to systematically exploit that knowledge on behalf of and in collaboration with its customers. It did not, because it cannot, not as long as the company’s revenues are bound to economies of action under the authority of the prediction imperative.

Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Cap…, loc. 959