What follows now are two distinct narratives of surveillance capitalists as “experimenters” who leverage their asymmetries of knowledge to impose their will on the unsuspecting human subjects who are their users. The experimental insights accumulated through their one-way mirrors are critical to constructing, fine-tuning, and exploring the capabilities of each firm’s for-profit means of behavioral modification. In Facebook’s user experiments and in the augmented-reality game Pokémon Go (imagined and incubated at Google), we see the commercial means of behavioral modification evolving before our eyes. Both combine the components of economies of action and the techniques of tuning, herding, and conditioning in startling new ways that expose the Greeks secreted deep in the belly of the Trojan horse: the economic orientation obscured behind the veil of the digital.

Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Cap…, loc. 934