Thanks to rendition, a handful of now-measurable personal characteristics, including the “need for love,” predict the likelihood of “liking a brand.” In a Twitter targeted-ad experiment, IBM found that it could significantly increase click-through rates and “follow” rates by targeting individuals with high “openness” and low “neuroticism” scores on the five-factor personality analysis. In another study, IBM rendered behavioral data from 2,000 Twitter users to establish metrics such as response rates, activity levels, and elapsed time between tweets, in addition to psycholinguistic analyses of tweets and five-factor personality analysis. IBM “trained” its predictive model by asking the 2,000 users either location-related or product-related questions. The findings showed that personality information predicted the likelihood of responses. People whom the machines rated as moral, trusting, friendly, extroverted, and agreeable tended to respond, compared to low response rates from people rated as cautious and anxious. Many of the characteristics that we try to teach our children and model in our own behavior are simply repurposed as dispossession opportunities for hidden machine processes of rendition. In this new world, paranoia and anxiety function as sources of protection from machine invasion for profit. Must we teach our children to be anxious and suspicious?

Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Cap…, loc. 864