SURVILLANCE CAPITALISM

26.09.2025 P 1 PAGE 180 Machine Emotion and the Capture of Human Feeling From Personal Data to Emotional Data The passage describes a European Commission–funded project called SEWA, carried out by the London-based startup Realeyes in 2015. Unlike earlier technologies that focused mainly on tracking behavior—what people search, buy, or click—SEWA sought to capture something even deeper: people’s emotions. By analyzing facial expressions, tone of voice, and unconscious reactions to advertisements or media, companies could predict not only what a person does but also how they feel while doing it. This represented the next step in what Shoshana Zuboff famously called behavioral surplus—the extraction of private human experience as raw material for commercial use. Affective Computing: The New Gold Rush The field known as affective computing or emotion analytics transforms feelings into quantifiable data. The logic is simple but powerful: if advertisers can know your emotions in real time, t...

                                                                             CHAPTER 9 18.9.24 (1) Title The Personal Digital Assistant: From Intimacy to Industrial Exploitation Satya Nadella introduced Microsoft’s Cortana in 2016 as a revolutionary personal digital assistant that could understand users deeply, work across devices, and embed itself in daily life. While this was framed as a technological liberation—helping people organize work, family, and social commitments—the reality was the opening of a new frontier in surveillance capitalism. Personal assistants do not simply serve users; they collect inner experiences such as intentions, moods, and preferences, and convert them into behavioral surplus for corporate profit. This transformation has wide-ranging economic implications in...