Google as the Pioneer of Surveillance Capitalism
Mass Communication Google LLC is United based technology company specialized in online services and products such as advertisements, search engines, and cloud computation. The company was initially incorporated in 1998 having been founded by Larry Page and Sergey Brin, then Stanford graduate students. The company has grown to become one of the most successful technology companies with subsidiaries such as YouTube, Firebase, Waymo, and Kaggle. This paper is a response to Shoshana Zuboff’s The Age of Surveillance Capitalism which is centered on the idea that Google, as a technological company, was a pioneer, discoverer, and lead practitioner of surveillance capitalism. The author’s assertion that the practices of Google deserve the same kind of analysis and examination as the beginning point of a powerful modern form of capitalism is true.
According to Zuboff (2019), companies like Ford and General Motors have all been placed under a lot of scrutinies with scores of researchers, engineers, journalists, and business people making attempts to excavate the circumstances of their origins, intervention, and implications. The same has, however, been difficult for a company such as Google which can be described as notoriously secretive with an internal spying program that discourages the staff members from violating the company’s confidential agreement. While this has made it difficult for people to understand the intricacies and complexities surrounding Google practices, the company’s long time chief economists. Hal Varian, in two of his articles, has attempted to identify the theme of computer-mediated transactions and their effects on the economy. Varian’s assertion that the presence of a computer in virtually every transaction has produced new uses for these computers: data extraction and analysis, personalization and customization, and continuous experiments.
Data are the raw materials required for surveillance capitalism. Extraction, on the other, the hand can be defined as the social relations and material infrastructure with which Google asserts authority over data to make use of economies of scale in its raw materials supply operations. During the early stages of conception, Google engineers learned that the continuous flow of behavioral data had the potential of turning the search engine into a learning system that perpetually improved the search results spurring product innovations such as spell check and voice recognition.
“At the 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 and more learning produced more relevance more relevance mean t more searches and more users” (Zubboff, 2019).
Google as a technological company and a search engine application was created to grow on the above concept of symbiosis whereby every action an individual took was considered a signal to be scrutinized, analyzed, and fed back to the system. The most popular results for the various queries people asked for was thus easily identifiable by the Page Rank algorithm that had been earlier developed. Through this concept, Google was able to obtain user data which provided value at no cost with the value reinvested in the user experience in the form of improved services. Unlike a typical brick and motor company where the user is the consumer, Google users cannot be regarded as customers but rather as the material of trade. This is particularly because there is no direct economic exchange, no profit, nor price between the service provider, Google, and the consumers.
In a typical capitalist company, the capitalist hires workers availing to thems means of production and wages. Every product produced by these workers belongs to the capitalist. In Google, however, the users are neither remunerated for their labor nor offered a means of production but are instead the sources of raw material supply. Through the balance of power were users needed the search in the same measure the search needed users, people were treated as ends themselves in a self-contained cycle that was effectively aligned with the company’s mission: “organizing the world’s information, making it universally accessible and useful” (Zubboff, 2019).
It was from this original concept of power balancing that Google ended up mining behavioral data not only to improve the service for the users but also to understand how the mind of the user to match ads to their lines of interests which are deduced from the collateral traces of their behaviors. With the company’s unique and exclusive access to this type of data, they were able to know what a particular user at a particular point was thinking, doing, and even feeling. Generally, Zubboff (2019) provides a clear blueprint for the changing dynamics in capitalism as facilitated by technology. It is also true that like the pioneers of mass production like Ford and General Motors, Google has grown to be able to change the field of advertisements through a data mining model that links the consumers to potential manufacturers.
The Nonsense of “the Internet”— and How to Stop It
The Internet can be defined as a global system of interconnected computer networks that employ the use of internet protocol suite (TCP/IP) to facilitate communication between networks and devices. The growth of the internet has significantly changed how human beings carry out their operations. The Internet has not only empowered people to communicate across geographical boundaries but has also made it easier for pother activities such as business, entertainment, health, and education. This paper explores Evgeny Morozov’s The nonsense of the internet in an attempt to understand its various implications on modern society.
According to Morozov, the intricacies and complexities surrounding the internet and how it works has made it difficult for policymakers to come up with regulations that will serve to mitigate its implications. The intricacies of the internet have thus made the internet so holy placing it beyond democratic representation. Any technological initiative that becomes part of the internet automatically loses its history and intellectual influence and hence becomes part of the grand narrative called the internet. Internet skeptics like Nicholas Carr have argued that digital technologies have a negative impact on how the human brain thinks and concentrates. According to Carr, the internet indirectly compels his brain to demand to be fed information in the same fashion the internet fed it. He also argues that the internet provides what can be described as a high-speed system for responses and rewards encouraging the repetition of both mental and physical actions.
According to Morozov (2013), it is impossible to currently perceive life without the internet because we naturally believe that it is not going anywhere. There is an accepted belief among the public that the internet is the ultimate technology and network. I agree with Morozov’s assertion that people by accepting the influence and power of the internet would rather work around it, accept its given features, and refurbish the world appropriately whether or not the idea of it sounds like religion. Science and technology writers like Steve Johnson assert that the internet goes beyond cheapo texting messages or funny captions on cats and that it’s an intellectual blueprint for society should be organized. Johnson’s assertion is true as I believe the internet must not be perceived as the ultimate solution to social problems but rather a different way of viewing the problem. According to Steve Johnson:
“one could use the Internet directly to improve people’s lives, but also learn from the way the Internet had been organized, and apply those principles to help improve the way city governments worked, or school systems taught students” (Morozov, 2013).
Practically, Johnson holds that a site like Kickstarter is designed to offer a better art funding model than existing organizations like the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA). It is true that the NEA should not be scrapped but rather made to work like the Kickstarter. Kickstarter is able to offer a more effective platform for more viable projects to raise more money bypassing the artsy bureaucrats in NEA who are mandated to make all decisions as to what projects should be funded. According to Morozov (2013), however, the new system may not necessarily promote justice and fairness. Contrary to what most internet optimists may believe, virality is less often self-generated or self-sustainable. Therefore while the Kickstarter may provide an illusion that it will facilitate a more efficient model for the distribution of art funding compared to the NEA, it would be important that we also consider the fact that the type or quality of art will be different. Johnson’s argument, however, is inclined on the concept that Kickstarter is internet-like and by facilitating crowdfunding better than the NEA.
I also agree with Jeff Jarvis’s argument that there values on the internet from which institutions can borrow. Jarvis argues that Google like the internet seems open, collaborative, and public. These are fundamentally the values of the internet that have played an integral role in bringing efficiency and profits. While Jarvis advocates for the values of the internet through an example of Google’s philosophy, it is also important to understand that while that openness might have the company’s initial goal, it has recently shut down most of the platforms that advocated for openness and has grown more exclusive charging for some of the services while removing others. In conclusion, I would like to second on the author’s assertion that the concept of the internet has sanctioned many people an experiment that attempts to place many lessons about the “internet” to good use (Morozov, 2013). The concept has naturally grown to become the chief enabler of s0lutionism. Internet centrism has made us oblivious to the point that some of the efforts have been defined by imprecise and old logic. Internet centrism has also primarily obscured how individuals perceive the past, present, and future and have become more like religion.
References
Morozow, E., & Morozov, E. (2013). To save everything, click here: technology, solutionism, and the urge to fix problems that don’t exist. Allen Lane.
Zuboff, S. (2019). The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power: Barack Obama’s Books of 2019. Profile Books.