Each of the ninety citizens had a unique claim. One had been terrorized by her former husband and didn’t want him to find her address online. Informational privacy was essential to her peace of mind and her physical safety. A middle-aged woman was embarrassed by an old arrest from her days as a university student. Informational privacy was essential to her identity and sense of dignity. One was an attorney, Mario Costeja González, who years earlier had suffered the foreclosure of his home. Although the matter had long been resolved, a Google search of his name continued to deliver links to the foreclosure notice, which, he argued, damaged his reputation. While the Spanish Data Protection Agency rejected the idea of requiring newspapers and other originating sites to remove legitimate information—such information, they reasoned, would exist somewhere under any circumstances—it endorsed the notion that Google had responsibility and should be held to account. After all, Google had unilaterally undertaken to change the rules of the information life cycle when it decided to crawl, index, and make accessible personal details across the world wide web without asking anyone’s permission. The agency concluded that citizens had the right to request the removal of links and ordered Google to stop indexing the information and to remove existing links to its original sources.
Google’s mission to “organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful”—starting with the web—changed all of our lives. There have been enormous benefits, to be sure. But for individuals it has meant that information that would normally age and be forgotten now remains forever young, highlighted in the foreground of each person’s digital identity. The Spanish Data Protection Agency recognized that not all information is worthy of immortality. Some information should be forgotten because that is only human. Unsurprisingly, Google challenged the agency’s order before the Spanish High Court, which selected one of the ninety cases, that of attorney Mario Costeja González, for referral to the Court of Justice of the European Union. There, after lengthy and dramatic deliberations, the Court of Justice announced its decision to assert the right to be forgotten as a fundamental principle of EU law in May of 2014.86
The Court of Justice’s decision, so often reduced to the legal and technical considerations related to the deletion or de-linking of personal data, was in fact a key inflection point at which democracy began to claw back rights to the future tense from the powerful forces of a new surveillance capitalism determined to claim unilateral authority over the digital future. Instead, the court’s analysis claimed the future for the human way, rejecting the inevitability of Google’s search-engine technology and recognizing instead that search results are the contingent products of the specific economic interests that drive the action from within the belly of the machine: “The operator of a search engine is liable to affect significantly the fundamental rights to privacy and to the protection of personal data. In the light of the potential seriousness of the interference” with those interests, “it cannot be justified by merely the economic interest which the operator of such an engine has in that processing.”87 As legal scholars Paul M. Schwartz and Karl-Nikolaus Peifer summarized it, “The Luxembourg Court felt that free flow of information matters, but not as much, ultimately, as the safeguarding of dignity, privacy, and data protection in the European rights regime.”88 The court conferred upon EU citizens the right to combat, requiring Google to establish a process for implementing users’ de-linking requests and authorizing citizens to seek recourse in democratic institutions, including “the supervisory authority or the judicial authority, so that it carries out the necessary checks and orders the controller to take specific measures accordingly.”89
In reasserting the right to be forgotten, the court declared that decisive authority over the digital future rests with the people, their laws, and their democratic institutions. It affirmed that individuals and democratic societies can fight for their rights to the future tense and can win, even in the face of a great private power. As the human rights scholar Federico Fabbrini observed, with this vital case the European Court of Justice evolved more assertively into the role of a human rights court, stepping into “the mine-field of human rights in the digital age.…”90
When the Court of Justice’s decision was announced, the “smart money” said that it could never happen in the US, where the internet companies typically seek cover behind the First Amendment as justification for their “permissionless innovation.”91 Some technology observers called the ruling “nuts.”92 Google’s leaders sneered at the decision. Reporters characterized Google cofounder Sergey Brin as “joking” and “dismissive.” When asked about the ruling during a Q&A at a prominent tech conference, he said, “I wish we could just forget the ruling.”93
In response to the ruling, Google CEO and cofounder Larry Page recited the catechism of the firm’s mission statement, assuring the Financial Times that the company “still aims to ‘organise the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.’” Page defended Google’s unprecedented information power with an extraordinary statement suggesting that people should trust Google more than democratic institutions: “In general, having the data present in companies like Google is better than having it in the government with no due process to get that data, because we obviously care about our reputation. I’m not sure the government cares about that as much.”94 Speaking to the company’s shareholders the day after the court’s ruling, Eric Schmidt characterized the decision as a “balance that was struck wrong” in the “collision between a right to be forgotten and a right to know.”95
The comments of Google’s leaders reflected their determination to retain privileged control over the future and their indignation at being challenged. However, there was ample evidence that the American public did not concede the corporation’s unilateral power. In fact, the smart money appeared not to be all that smart. In the year following the EU decision, a national poll of US adults found that 88 percent supported a law similar to the right to be forgotten. That year, Pew Research found that 93 percent of Americans believed that it was important to have control of “who can get information about you.” A series of polls echoed these findings.96
On January 1, 2015, California’s “Online Eraser” law took effect, requiring the operator of a website, online service, online application, or mobile application to permit a minor who is a registered user of the operator’s service to remove, or to request and obtain removal of, content or information posted by the minor. The California law breached a critical surveillance embattlement, attenuating Google’s role as the self-proclaimed champion of an unbounded right to know and suggesting that we are still at the beginning, not the end, of a long and fitful drama.
The Spanish Data Protection Agency and later the European Court of Justice demonstrated the unbearable lightness of the inevitable, as both institutions declared what is at stake for a human future, beginning with the primacy of democratic institutions in shaping a healthy and just digital future. The smart money says that US law will never abandon its allegiance to the surveillance capitalists over the people. But the next decades may once again prove that the smart money can be wrong. As for the Spanish people, their Data Protection Agency, and the European Court of Justice, the passage of time is likely to reveal their achievements as a stirring early chapter in the longer story of our fight for a third modern that is first and foremost a human future, rooted in an inclusive democracy and committed to the individual’s right to effective life. Their message is carefully inscribed for our children to ponder: technological inevitability is as light as democracy is heavy, as temporary as the scent of rose petals and the taste of honey are enduring.
VIII. Naming and Taming
Taming surveillance capitalism must begin with careful naming, a symbiosis that was vividly illustrated in the recent history of HIV research, and I offer it as an analogy. For three decades, scientists aimed to create a vaccine that followed the logic of earlier cures, training the immune system to produc
e neutralizing antibodies, but mounting data revealed unanticipated behaviors of the HIV virus that defy the patterns of other infectious diseases.97
The tide began to turn at the International AIDS Conference in 2012, when new strategies were presented that rely on a close understanding of the biology of rare HIV carriers whose blood produces natural antibodies. Research began to shift toward methods that reproduce this self-vaccinating response.98 As a leading researcher announced, “We know the face of the enemy now, and so we have some real clues about how to approach the problem.”99
The point for us is that every successful vaccine begins with a close understanding of the enemy disease. The mental models, vocabularies, and tools distilled from past catastrophes obstruct progress. We smell smoke and rush to close doors to rooms that are already fated to vanish. The result is like hurling snowballs at a smooth marble wall only to watch them slide down its facade, leaving nothing but a wet smear: a fine paid here, an operational detour there, a new encryption package there.
What is crucial now is that we identify this new form of capitalism on its own terms and in its own words. This pursuit necessarily returns us to Silicon Valley, where things move so fast that few people know what just happened. It is the habitat for progress “at the speed of dreams,” as one Google engineer vividly describes it.100 My aim here is to slow down the action in order to enlarge the space for such debate and unmask the tendencies of these new creations as they amplify inequality, intensify social hierarchy, exacerbate exclusion, usurp rights, and strip personal life of whatever it is that makes it personal for you or for me. If the digital future is to be our home, then it is we who must make it so. We will need to know. We will need to decide. We will need to decide who decides. This is our fight for a human future.
CHAPTER THREE
THE DISCOVERY OF BEHAVIORAL SURPLUS
He watched the stars and noted birds in flight;
A river flooded or a fortress fell:
He made predictions that were sometimes right;
His lucky guesses were rewarded well.
—W. H. AUDEN
SONNETS FROM CHINA, VI
I. Google: The Pioneer of Surveillance Capitalism
Google is to surveillance capitalism what the Ford Motor Company and General Motors were to mass-production–based managerial capitalism. New economic logics and their commercial models are discovered by people in a time and place and then perfected through trial and error. In our time Google became the pioneer, discoverer, elaborator, experimenter, lead practitioner, role model, and diffusion hub of surveillance capitalism. GM and Ford’s iconic status as pioneers of twentieth-century capitalism made them enduring objects of scholarly research and public fascination because the lessons they had to teach resonated far beyond the individual companies. Google’s practices deserve the same kind of examination, not merely as a critique of a single company but rather as the starting point for the codification of a powerful new form of capitalism.
With the triumph of mass production at Ford and for decades thereafter, hundreds of researchers, businesspeople, engineers, journalists, and scholars would excavate the circumstances of its invention, origins, and consequences.1 Decades later, scholars continued to write extensively about Ford, the man and the company.2 GM has also been an object of intense scrutiny. It was the site of Peter Drucker’s field studies for his seminal Concept of the Corporation, the 1946 book that codified the practices of the twentieth-century business organization and established Drucker’s reputation as a management sage. In addition to the many works of scholarship and analysis on these two firms, their own leaders enthusiastically articulated their discoveries and practices. Henry Ford and his general manager, James Couzens, and Alfred Sloan and his marketing man, Henry “Buck” Weaver, reflected on, conceptualized, and proselytized their achievements, specifically locating them in the evolutionary drama of American capitalism.3
Google is a notoriously secretive company, and one is hard-pressed to imagine a Drucker equivalent freely roaming the scene and scribbling in the hallways. Its executives carefully craft their messages of digital evangelism in books and blog posts, but its operations are not easily accessible to outside researchers or journalists.4 In 2016 a lawsuit brought against the company by a product manager alleged an internal spying program in which employees are expected to identify coworkers who violate the firm’s confidentiality agreement: a broad prohibition against divulging anything about the company to anyone.5 The closest thing we have to a Buck Weaver or James Couzens codifying Google’s practices and objectives is the company’s longtime chief economist, Hal Varian, who aids the cause of understanding with scholarly articles that explore important themes. Varian has been described as “the Adam Smith of the discipline of Googlenomics” and the “godfather” of its advertising model.6 It is in Varian’s work that we find hidden-in-plain-sight important clues to the logic of surveillance capitalism and its claims to power.
In two extraordinary articles in scholarly journals, Varian explored the theme of “computer-mediated transactions” and their transformational effects on the modern economy.7 Both pieces are written in amiable, down-to-earth prose, but Varian’s casual understatement stands in counterpoint to his often-startling declarations: “Nowadays there is a computer in the middle of virtually every transaction… now that they are available these computers have several other uses.”8 He then identifies four such new uses: “data extraction and analysis,” “new contractual forms due to better monitoring,” “personalization and customization,” and “continuous experiments.”
Varian’s discussions of these new “uses” are an unexpected guide to the strange logic of surveillance capitalism, the division of learning that it shapes, and the character of the information civilization toward which it leads. We will return to Varian’s observations from time to time in the course of our examination of the foundations of surveillance capitalism, aided by a kind of “reverse engineering” of his assertions, so that we might grasp the worldview and methods of surveillance capitalism through this lens. “Data extraction and analysis,” Varian writes, “is what everyone is talking about when they talk about big data.” “Data” are the raw material necessary for surveillance capitalism’s novel manufacturing processes. “Extraction” describes the social relations and material infrastructure with which the firm asserts authority over those raw materials to achieve economies of scale in its raw-material supply operations. “Analysis” refers to the complex of highly specialized computational systems that I will generally refer to in these chapters as “machine intelligence.” I like this umbrella phrase because it trains us on the forest rather than the trees, helping us decenter from technology to its objectives. But in choosing this phrase I also follow Google’s lead. The company describes itself “at the forefront of innovation in machine intelligence,” a term in which it includes machine learning as well as “classical” algorithmic production, along with many computational operations that are often referred to with other terms such as “predictive analytics” or “artificial intelligence.” Among these operations Google cites its work on language translation, speech recognition, visual processing, ranking, statistical modeling, and prediction: “In all of those tasks and many others, we gather large volumes of direct or indirect evidence of relationships of interest, applying learning algorithms to understand and generalize.”9 These machine intelligence operations convert raw material into the firm’s highly profitable algorithmic products designed to predict the behavior of its users. The inscrutability and exclusivity of these techniques and operations are the moat that surrounds the castle and secures the action within.
Google’s invention of targeted advertising paved the way to financial success, but it also laid the cornerstone of a more far-reaching development: the discovery and elaboration of surveillance capitalism. Its business is characterized as an advertising model, and much has been written about Google’s automated auction methods and other aspects of its invent
ions in the field of online advertising. With so much verbiage, these developments are both over-described and under-theorized. Our aim in this chapter and those that follow in Part I is to reveal the “laws of motion” that drive surveillance competition, and in order to do this we begin by looking freshly at the point of origin, when the foundational mechanisms of surveillance capitalism were first discovered.
Before we begin, I want to say a word about vocabulary. Any confrontation with the unprecedented requires new language, and I introduce new terms when existing language fails to capture a new phenomenon. Sometimes, however, I intentionally repurpose familiar language because I want to stress certain continuities in the function of an element or process. This is the case with “laws of motion,” borrowed from Newton’s laws of inertia, force, and equal and opposite reactions.
Over the years historians have adopted this term to describe the “laws” of industrial capitalism. For example, economic historian Ellen Meiksins Wood documents the origins of capitalism in the changing relations between English property owners and tenant farmers, as the owners began to favor productivity over coercion: “The new historical dynamic allows us to speak of ‘agrarian capitalism’ in early modern England, a social form with distinctive ‘laws of motion’ that would eventually give rise to capitalism in its mature, industrial form.”10 Wood describes how the new “laws of motion” eventually manifested themselves in industrial production:
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