Personal data isn’t the ‘new oil,’ it’s a way to manipulate capitalism

  My recent research increasingly focuses on how individuals can and do manipulate, or “game,” contemporary capitalism. It involves what social scientists call reflexivity and physicists call the observer effect.

  Reflexivity can be summed up as the way our knowledge claims end up changing the world and the behaviors we seek to describe and explain.

  Sometimes this is self-fulfilling. A knowledge claim — like “everyone is selfish,” for example — can change social institutions and social behaviors so that we actually end up acting more selfish, thereby enacting the original claim.