There was time when you searched Google, but now Google searches you
In Zuboff ‘s view Google’s original aim of making all the world’s information accessible mutated into a ruthless domineering to make money by exploiting and modifying human behaviour, by serving up ads to users just when they are most susceptible to persuasion and generating wants they did not know they had. Google is following a policy to land grab all our data, inventing new products to vacuum up every fragment of digital map. Every smart device from digital Assistant like “Hey Google” to rectal thermometers, self-driving cars to connected homes has become a data gathering mechanism. They all become the tool and serve as one-way mirrors allowing the surveillance capitalists to spy on us without us ever seeing what is going on behind the glass. “There was time when you searched Google, but now Google searches you” Zyboff writes. We are at a critical juncture in the confrontation between the vast power of giant high-tech companies and government, the hidden economic logic of surveillance capitalism, and the propaganda of machine supremacy that threaten to shape and control human life with the new brazen methods of social engineering and behaviour modification threaten individual autonomy and democratic rights and introduce extreme new forms of social inequality as we often wonder will the promise of the digital age be one of individual empowerment or democratisation.
Seven of Google’s products and platforms engage 1bn active monthly users Gmail, Android, Chrome, Maps, Search, YouTube and Google Play Store, enabling the company to track even more areas of a user’s life. Facebook has 2bn users and is also expanding its interests into the physical world.
She compares the expansionism of the surveillance capitalists to that the Spanish conquistadors, who staked claims to virgin territories in the New World while supressing the unsuspected native Americans.
In Zuboff’s view, concealing the dark reality behind the public illusion, Google users are not its customers, which means it is radically indifferent to their real interests as advertising-funded search engines will always prioritise those who pay the bills over those who use its services, so long as they remain hooked.
Sergey Brin and Larry Page, Google’s founders who presented a paper in 1998 high-lighting the perils of advertising. “We expect that advertising-funded search engines will be inherently biased towards the advertisers and away from the needs of consumers. This type of bias is very difficult to detect but could still have a significant effect on the market” they wrote.
Worldview changed when Google realised that the behavioural insights it could draw form its data were a potential gold mine, offering far greater rewards than other advertising driven businesses such as commercial television. Zuboff claims that the clearest logic of surveillance capitalism has been articulated by Hal Varian, Google’s chief economist, who is referred to as the “godfather” of the company’s advertising model. Varian identified four features of this new economy: data extraction and analysis, new contractual forms due to better monetisation, personalisation and customisation and continuous experimentation, and this formula enabled Google to generate vast wealth and has been copied by so many others since.
Surveillance capitalism is particularly ubiquitous and the way it preys upon our behavioural vulnerabilities. Surveillance capitalists have been able to commoditise the fiction of behaviour, turning our data into profit. “They no longer merely host content but aggressively, secretly, and unilaterally extract value from that content.” Surveillance Capitalists are not only able to monetise our data but can also use it to predict our behaviour and thereby modify it. In technical terms they are no longer just sensors but actuators.
China’s vision to use technology to monitor its citizens and assign them social credit scores, used to reward or punish citizens for what the authorities deem to be socially good or bad behaviour.
She attacks technology’s ideology of inevitabilism and its inability to evolve the internet in another way. We should be constantly wary of those offering sweeping technological solutions to human problems. It is always better to wrestle with problems in imperfect messy human ways than to jump to all-embracing inhuman solutions.
The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power by Shoshana Zuboff, Profile Books £25, 692 pages.