Read the following excerpts from Shosbana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism:
Google was incorporated in 1998, founded by Stanford graduate students Larry Page and
Sergey Brin.... . From the start, the company embodied the promise of information capitalism
as a liberating and democratic social force that galvanized and delighted second-modernity
populations around the world.
Thanks to this wide embrace, Google successfully imposed computer mediation on broad new
domains of human behavior as people searched online and engaged with the web through' a
growing roster of Google services. As these new activities were informated for the first time,
they produced wholly new data resources. For example, in addition to key words, each
Google search query produces a wake of collateral data such as the number and pattem of
search terms, how a query is phrased, spelling, punctuation, dwell times, click patterns, and
location.
Early on, these behavioral by-products were haphazardly stored and operationally ignored....
Google's engincers soon grasped that the continuous flows of collateral behavioral data could
turn the search engine into a recursive leamning system that constantly improved search results
and spurred product innovations such as spell check, translation, and voice recognition.
...
At that early stage of Google's development, the feedback loops involved in improving its
Search functions produced a balance of power: Search needed people to learn from, and
people needed Search to learn from. This symbiosis enabled Google's algorithms to learn and
produce ever-more relevant and comprehensive search results. More queries meant more
learning; more learning produced more relevance. More relevance meant more searches and
more users.. . The Page Rank algorithm, named-after its founder, had already given Google a
significant advantage in identifying the most popular results for queries. Over the course of
the next few years it would be the capture, storage, analysis, and leamning from the
by-products of those search queries that would turn Google into the gold standard of web
search.
The key point for us rests on a critical distinction. During this early period, behavioral data
were put to work entirely on the user's behalf. User data provided value at no cost, and that
value was reinvested in the user experience in the form of improved services: enhancements
that were also offered at no cost to users. Users provided the raw material in the form of
behavioral data, and those data were barvested to improve speed, accuracy, and relevance and
to help build ancillary products such as translation. I call this the behavioral value
reinvestment cycle, in which all behavioral data are reinvested in the improvement of the
product or service.
...
This helps to explain why it is inaccurate to think of Google's users as its customers: there is
no economic exchange, no price, and no profit. Nor do users function in the role of workers:
When a capitalist hires workers and provides them with wages and means of production, the
products that they produce belong to the capitalist to sell at a profit. Not so here. Users are not
paid for their labor, nor do they operate the means of production, as we'll discuss in more
depth later in this chapter. Finally, people often say that the user is the "product." This is also
misleading, and it is a point that we will revisit more than once. For now let's say that users
are not products, but rather we are the sources of raw-material supply. As we shall see,
surveillance capitalism's unusual products manage to be derived from our behavior while
remaining indifferent to our behavior. Its products are about predicting us, without actually
caring what we do or what is done to us.
To summarize, at this early stage of Google's development, whatever Search users
inadvertently gave up that was of value to the company they also used up in the form of
improved services. In this reinvestment cycle, serving users with amazing Search results
"consumed" all the value that users created when they provided extra behavioral data. The
fact that users needed Search about as much as Search needed users created a balance of
power between Google and its populations. People were treated as ends in themselves, the
subjects of a nonmarket, self-contained cycle that was perfectly aligned with Google's stated
mission "to organize the world's information, making it universally acce essible and useful."'
By 1999, despite the splendor of Google's new world of searchable web pages, its growing
computer science capabilities, and its glamorous venture backers, there was no reliable way to
turn investors' money into revenue. The behavioral value reinvestment cycle produced a very
cool search function, but it was not yet capitalism. For all their genius and principled
insights, Brin and Page could not ignore the mounting sense of emergency. By December
2000, the Wall Street Journal reported on the new "mantra" emerging from Silicon Valley's
investment community: "Simply displaying the ability to make money will not be enough to
remain a major player in the years ahead. What will be required will be an ability to show
sustained and exponential profits."
...
At Google in late 2000, it became a rationale for annulling the reciprocal relationship that
existed betwe een Google and its users, steeling the founders to abandon their passionate and
public opposition to advertising.... To meet the new objective, the behavioral value
reinvestment cycle was rapidly and secretly subordinated to a larger and more complex
undertaking. The raw materials that had been solely used to improve the quality of search
results would now also be put to use in the service of targeting advertising to individual users.
Some data would continue to be applied to service improvement, but the growing stores of
collateral signals would be repurposed to improve the profitability of ads for both Google and
its advertisers. These behavioral data available for uses beyond service improvement
constituted a surplus, and it was on the strength of this behavioral surplus that the young
company would find its way to the "sustained and exponential profits" that would be
necessary for survival. Thanks to a perceived cmergency, a new mutation began to gather
form and quietly slip its moorings in the implicit advocacy-oriented social contract of the
firm's original relationship with users.
...
In other words, Google would no longer mine behavioral data strictly to improve service for
users but rather to read users' minds for the purposes of matching ads to their interests, as
those interests are deduced from the collateral traces of online behavior. With Google's
unique access to behavioral data, it would now be possible to know what a particular
individual in a particular time and place was thinking, feeling, and doing. That this no longer
seems astonishing to us, or perhaps even worthy of note, is evidence of the profound psychic
numbing that has inured us to a bold and unprecedented shift in capitalist methods.