The research studies and first-person accounts that we have reviewed reveal the coercive underbelly of the instrumentarian’s much revered “confluence,” in which harmonies are achieved at the expense of the psychological integrity of participants. This is the world of Pentland’s “social learning,” his theory of “tuning” little more than the systematic manipulation of the rewards and punishments of inclusion and exclusion. It succeeds through the natural human inclination to avoid psychological pain. Just as ordinary consumers can become compulsive gamblers at the hands of the gaming industry’s behavioral technologies, psychologically ordinary young people are drawn into an unprecedented vortex of social information that automatically triggers social comparison on an equally unprecedented scale. This mental and emotional milieu appears to produce a virus of insecurity and anxiety that drives a young person deeper into this closed loop of escalating compulsion as he or she chases relief in longed-for signals of valorization.

Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Cap…, loc. 1485