In a third phase of competitive intensity, surveillance capitalists discovered the necessity of economies of action based on new methods that go beyond tracking, capturing, analyzing, and predicting behavior in order to intervene in the state of play and actively shape behavior at the source. The result is that the means of production are subordinated to an elaborate new means of behavioral modification, which relies upon a variety of machine processes, techniques, and tactics (tuning, herding, conditioning) to shape individual, group, and population behavior in ways that continuously improve their approximation to guaranteed outcomes. Just as industrial capitalism was driven to the continuous intensification of the means of production, so surveillance capitalists are now locked in a cycle of continuous intensification of the means of behavioral modification.

Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Cap…, loc. 1071