Consumer Databases, Neoliberalism, and the Commercial Mediation of Identity: A Medium Theory Analysis
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This paper argues that the systemic nature of contemporary consumer surveillance undermines the most fundamental principle of free market economics: consumer sovereignty. Specifically, this paper argues that the rise of an ‘information’ or ‘knowledge’ society in conjunction with neoliberal capitalism has entrenched routine forms of surveillance within commercial strategies by employing networked databases as a primary medium for the articulation of consumer sovereignty (choice/demand). The communicative relationship between consumers and producers within the market involves effectively ‘listening’ (and then responding) to consumer needs and wants in a timely manner. Surveillance is therefore not only necessary for the operation of globalized consumer capitalism, it is also the primary means by which consumer communicate their sovereignty within the marketplace. By turning to the work of Harold Innis and the intellectual tradition known as medium theory, this paper will theorize how in linking the actions of individual consumers to the decision-making capacities of trans-national corporations (TNC), the prevalence of consumer databases violates the fundamental neutrality of the market, and thus sovereignty, of individual consumers. In sum, by treating the database as a distinct communication medium, this paper will highlight how the commercial mediation of identity under neoliberalism can conceal the potential for the uneven geographic development, the marginalization of ‘less valuable’ consumer segments, and the exploitation of individual vulnerabilities through behavior and profile modeling.
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Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.010 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it