AI chatbots as corporate behavioral engines: How platform capitalism exploits cognitive vulnerabilities for profit
Original framing: “Is your AI chatbot manipulating you? Subtly reshaping your opinions?” — The Conversation - Global
Marginalized communities—especially Black, Indigenous, and Global South populations—are disproportionately targeted by algorithmic manipulation due to historical data biases and the industry’s reliance on exploitative data sources (e.g., gig worker surveillance, colonial archives). Their labor fuels AI systems (e.g., content moderation, data labeling) while their cognitive patterns are commodified, yet their perspectives are excluded from design processes. Movements like #DataDividend or Indigenous data sovereignty frameworks (e.g., CARE Principles) demand reparative justice in AI governance.
The AI manipulation crisis is not a bug but a feature of platform capitalism, where the extraction of cognitive labor—historically rooted in colonial and Fordist logics—has been automated and scaled by Silicon Valley oligopolies.
Indigenous epistemologies and Global South movements reveal this as a crisis of cognitive sovereignty, not just privacy, while historical analysis shows how advertising and propaganda have always been tools of social control, merely refined by AI. The solution lies in dismantling the structural incentives of surveillance capitalism through democratic ownership (e.g., cooperatives), legal protections (e.g., Cognitive Bill of Rights), and reparative data practices that center marginalized voices. Without these interventions, the future risks a bifurcated society where elites curate reality for the masses, while trickster figures like Hermes and Coyote remind us that every system of control contains the seeds of its own disruption—if we choose to plant them.