Abstract
We are currently witnessing the rise of a platform capitalism that bases a significant part of its economy on producing behavioral profiles to direct users' actions towards private ends. By associating radical behaviorism techniques with algorithmic data processing technologies, a force that Bernard Stiegler has identified as "psychopower" has intensified and consolidated. This article aims to demonstrate how this is achieved by deploying two control technologies in the architecture of digital platforms: Affective Computing and the Hook Model. Through an ethnographic study on the BeReal social network, we show how these two technologies first capture users' attention and create usage habits and second, promote the circulation of emotions so that these can be linked to specific contexts and datafied to develop behavioral profiles. Finally, we conduct a theoretical exercise to argue that both control technologies are key elements of a new power dispositif that we call "pulsional," which triggers an action in individuals that bypasses their conscious reflection, leading to detrimental consequences for the exercise of their freedom.
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