Schmidt’s role in President Obama’s election was but one chapter in a long, and by now fabled, relationship that some have described as a “love affair.”101 Not surprisingly, Schmidt took on an even more prominent role in the 2012 reelection campaign. He led in fundraising and in breaking new technical ground, and he “personally oversaw the voter-turnout system on election night.”102
Political correspondent Jim Rutenberg’s New York Times account of the data scientists’ seminal role in the 2012 Obama victory offers a vivid picture of the capture and analysis of behavioral surplus as a political methodology. The campaign knew “every single wavering voter in the country that it needed to persuade to vote for Obama, by name, address, race, sex, and income,” and it had figured out how to target its television ads to these individuals. One breakthrough was the “persuasion score” that identified how easily each undecided voter could be persuaded to vote for the Democratic candidate.103
The facts of behavioral surplus and its predictive power were kept top secret in the Obama campaigns, just as they are in Google, Facebook, and other domains of information dominance. As Rutenberg observed, “The extent to which the campaign used the newest tech tools to look into people’s lives and the sheer amount of personal data its vast servers were crunching remained largely shrouded. The secrecy… was partly… to maintain their competitive edge. But it was also no doubt because they worried that practices like ‘data mining’ and ‘analytics’ could make voters uncomfortable.”104
Second, with the 2012 election in sight, an interview with the Washington Post in 2011 found Schmidt boasting about another fortification strategy: “The staffers are young—the staffers get it.… So that’s what we depend on. And of course we’ve hired ex-staffers as well. They all know each other. So that’s how it really works.”105 Google’s political utilities paved the way for the unusually crowded and fast-spinning revolving door between the East Coast and West Coast centers of power. The Google Transparency Project analyzed the movement of staff between the Googlesphere (the company plus its affiliates and its law and lobbying firms) and the government (including the White House, Congress, government agencies, federal commissions, and national political campaigns) during the Obama years. It found that by April 2016, 197 individuals had migrated from the government into the Googlesphere, and 61 had moved in the other direction. Among these, 22 White House officials went to work for Google, and 31 Googlesphere executives joined the White House or federal advisory boards with direct relevance to Google’s business.106
Third, just to be on the safe side, Google shared its largesse throughout the political system. In Schmidt’s 2014 book, coauthored with longtime Google executive Jonathan Rosenberg, the CEO aggressively developed the theme of government as the shill of incumbents colluding to inhibit change, with Google on the outside: an upstart and a disrupter. The authors voiced their disdain for politicians and lobbyists, writing, “This is the natural path of politicians since incumbents tend to have a lot more money than disrupters and are quite expert in using it to bend the political will of any democratic government.”107
That same year, while Schmidt disparaged incumbents and their political sway, Google spent more on lobbying than any other corporation—over $17 million and nearly twice as much as surveillance rival Facebook. In the next few years, as the White House changed hands, Google maintained its pace, outspending every other company with a more than $18 million lobbying outlay in 2018 as the company fended off privacy legislation and other initiatives that might impede its freedom to capture and process behavioral surplus. Google was also among the wealthiest of all registered lobbyists in the EU, second only to a lobbying group that represents a confederation of European corporations.108
The firm also learned to engineer sophisticated lobbying efforts at the state level, primarily geared to fight back any proposed legislation that would augment privacy and curtail behavioral surplus operations. For example, Google won the right to put its self-driving cars on the road—anticipated as important supply chains—after enlisting Obama officials to lobby state regulators for key legislation.109 Both Google and Facebook currently lead aggressive state-level lobbying campaigns aimed at repelling or weakening statutes to regulate biometric data and protect privacy. As one report put it, “They want your body.”110
In the fourth arena of fortifications the corporation learned to infiltrate and influence academic research and civil society advocacy in ways that softened or in some cases thwarted the examination of its practices. The Washington Post describes Google as a “master of Washington influence” and notes the subtlety with which the firm grasps and directs its own narrative. Schmidt was hands-on in this work as well. Already a board member of the New America Foundation, a public-policy think tank that played an influential role in shaping the Obama administration’s approach to economic issues, he assumed the chairmanship in 2013 with a personal donation of $1 million, a significant percentage of its $12.9 million annual budget that year. Between 1999 and 2016, when Schmidt left the board, the foundation received $21 million from a combination of Google, Schmidt, and Schmidt’s family foundation.111
The Washington Post published an elaborate exposé of Google’s meticulous work in this fourth domain, illustrated in the backstage intrigues that accompanied a three-part series on internet search competition held at George Mason University’s Law and Economics Center, a “free-market–oriented” academic center that had received significant funding from Google.112 The meetings occurred in May 2012, just as the FTC was investigating the Google antitrust case. Reporters found that company staffers worked closely with the center, choosing pro-Google speakers and participants, many of whom were Google employees. Their efforts included “sending the center’s staff a detailed spreadsheet listing members of Congress, FTC commissioners, and senior officials with the Justice Department and state attorney general’s office.” Reporters noted that the conference’s panels were dominated by “leading technology and legal experts” who forcefully rejected the need for government action against Google, “making their arguments before some of the very regulators who would help determine its fate.” Many participants had no idea that Google was involved in crafting the meetings because Google and center staffers had agreed to conceal the corporation’s backstage involvement.113
The FTC antitrust investigation appears to have heightened Google’s fears of a regulatory threat to surveillance capitalism. That year, Google’s grant-making operation aimed at civil society organizations took an aggressive turn. According to the Center for Media and Democracy’s investigatory research report, “The Googlization of the Far Right,” the corporation’s 2012 list of grantees featured a new group of antigovernment groups known for their opposition to regulation and taxes and their support for climate-change denial, including Grover Norquist’s Americans for Tax Reform, the Koch brothers–funded Heritage Action, and other antiregulatory groups such as the Federalist Society and the Cato Institute.114 The corporation also quietly acknowledged its membership in the corporate lobbying group ALEC, known for its opposition to gun control and emissions curbs, and for its support for voter-suppression schemes, tobacco industry tax breaks, and other far-right causes.115 Meanwhile, a list of Google Policy Fellows for 2014 included individuals from a range of nonprofit organizations whom one would expect to be leading the fight against that corporation’s concentrations of information and power, including the Center for Democracy and Technology, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the Future of Privacy Forum, the National Consumers League, the Citizen Lab, and the Asociación por los Derechos Civiles.116
In July 2017 the Wall Street Journal reported that since 2009, Google had actively sought out and provided funding to university professors for research and policy papers that support Google’s positions on matters related to law, regulation, competition, patents, and so forth.117 In many cases, Google weighed in on the papers before publication, and some of the authors did not disclose Google as a source o
f funding. Although Google publicly claimed that “the check came with no requirements,” another case in 2017 belied that notion. That summer, one of the New America Foundation’s most highly regarded scholars and a specialist in digital monopolies, Barry Lynn, posted a statement praising the EU’s historic decision to levy a $2.7 billion fine on Google as the result of a multiyear antitrust investigation. According to the New York Times and Lynn’s own account, New America’s director bent to pressure from Schmidt, firing Lynn and his Open Markets team of ten researchers. “Google is very aggressive in throwing its money around Washington and Brussels, and then pulling strings,” Lynn told the New York Times. “People are so afraid of Google now.” The reporters cite Google’s “muscular and sophisticated” influence operation as surpassing any other US company’s.118
With Google in the lead, surveillance capitalism vastly expanded the market dynamic as it learned to expropriate human experience and translate it into coveted behavioral predictions. Google and this larger surveillance project have been birthed, sheltered, and nurtured to success by the historical conditions of their era—second-modernity needs, the neoliberal inheritance, and the realpolitik of surveillance exceptionalism—as well as by their own purpose-built fortifications designed to protect supply chain operations from scrutiny through political and cultural capture.
Surveillance capitalism’s ability to keep democracy at bay produced these stark facts. Two men at Google who do not enjoy the legitimacy of the vote, democratic oversight, or the demands of shareholder governance exercise control over the organization and presentation of the world’s information. One man at Facebook who does not enjoy the legitimacy of the vote, democratic oversight, or the demands of shareholder governance exercises control over an increasingly universal means of social connection along with the information concealed in its networks.
CHAPTER FIVE
THE ELABORATION OF SURVEILLANCE CAPITALISM: KIDNAP, CORNER, COMPETE
All words like Peace and Love,
all sane affirmative speech,
had been soiled, profaned, debased
to a horrid mechanical screech.
—W. H. AUDEN
“WE TOO HAD KNOWN GOLDEN HOURS”
I. The Extraction Imperative
“Our ultimate ambition is to transform the overall Google experience, making it beautifully simple,” Larry Page said, “almost automagical because we understand what you want and can deliver it instantly.”1 In the drive to fulfill this ambition, the extraction imperative produces a relentless push for scale in supply operations. There can be no boundaries that limit scale in the hunt for behavioral surplus, no territory exempted from plunder. The assertion of decision rights over the expropriation of human experience, its translation into data, and the uses of those data are collateral to this process, inseparable as a shadow. This explains why Google’s supply chains began with Search but steadily expanded to encompass new and even-more-ambitious territories far from clicks and queries. Google’s stores of behavioral surplus now embrace everything in the online milieu: searches, e-mails, texts, photos, songs, messages, videos, locations, communication patterns, attitudes, preferences, interests, faces, emotions, illnesses, social networks, purchases, and so on. A new continent of behavioral surplus is spun each moment from the many virtual threads of our everyday lives as they collide with Google, Facebook, and, more generally, every aspect of the internet’s computer-mediated architecture. Indeed, under the direction of surveillance capitalism the global reach of computer mediation is repurposed as an extraction architecture.
This process originated online but has spread to the real world as well, a fact that we will examine more closely in Part II. If Google is a search company, why is it investing in smart-home devices, wearables, and self-driving cars? If Facebook is a social network, why is it developing drones and augmented reality? This diversity sometimes confounds observers but is generally applauded as visionary investment: far-out bets on the future. In fact, activities that appear to be varied and even scattershot across a random selection of industries and projects are actually all the same activity guided by the same aim: behavioral surplus capture. Each is a slightly different configuration of hardware, software, algorithms, sensors, and connectivity designed to mimic a car, shirt, cell phone, book, video, robot, chip, drone, camera, cornea, tree, television, watch, nanobot, intestinal flora, or any online service, but they all share the same purpose: behavioral surplus capture.
Google is a shape-shifter, but each shape harbors the same aim: to hunt and capture raw material. Baby, won’t you ride my car? Talk to my phone? Wear my shirt? Use my map? In all these cases the varied torrent of creative shapes is the sideshow to the main event: the continuous expansion of the extraction architecture to acquire raw material at scale to feed an expensive production process that makes prediction products that attract and retain more customers. When confronted in 2008 with a question about why Google had 150 “products,” its CEO, Eric Schmidt, responded: “That can be stated as criticism, but it can also be stated as strategy. The goal of the company is customer satisfaction. You should think of Google as one product: customer satisfaction.”2 Those customers are the world’s advertisers and others who pay for its predictions. “Customer satisfaction” therefore equates to Google’s dominant market share in lucrative new behavioral futures markets, fed by its ever-expanding extraction architecture.
New supply routes are continuously constructed and tested, and only some go operational. Routes that reliably produce scale, such as the Android smartphone operating system or Gmail, are elaborated and institutionalized. Those that fail are shuttered or modified. If one route is blocked, another is found. Successful supply routes double as canvases for targeted advertising, expanding the reach of behavioral futures markets and simultaneously engaging users in ways that yield yet more behavioral surplus. There will always be a changing roster of supply routes, but all variations share the same operational mandate: the capture of behavioral surplus and the acquisition of decision rights. Like a river running to the sea, if one route is blocked, another is found.
In this chapter we follow the consequences of the extraction imperative as it drives the elaboration of the new market form and its competitive dynamics. The imperative elevates surplus supply operations to a defining role in every aspect of the surveillance capitalist enterprise. This begins with a continuous parade of innovations aimed at cornering raw-material supplies. Cornering is not simply a technological achievement. Sustainable dispossession requires a highly orchestrated and carefully phased amalgam of political, communicative, administrative, legal, and material strategies that audaciously asserts and tirelessly defends claims to new ground. The success of these strategies, first at Google and later at Facebook, established both their feasibility and their rewards, drawing new competitors into an increasingly ruthless cycle of kidnapping human experience, cornering surplus supplies, and competing in new behavioral futures markets.
II. Cornered
The discovery of behavioral surplus in 2001–2002 meant that Google Search would be the first Google “service” to be re-crafted as a supply route. The resulting shifts in the mechanisms of Search were nearly impossible for people to imagine, let alone detect. When Harvard Business School’s Benjamin Edelman researched these hidden mechanisms in 2010, he found that the “enhanced features” option of a product called Google Toolbar—a plug-in for Microsoft’s Internet Explorer web browser that lets users search without having to go to google.com—transmits to the company “the full URL of every page view, including searches at competing search engines.” Edelman discovered that it was “strikingly easy” to activate this option but impossible to disable it. Even when a user specifically instructed that the toolbar be disabled, and even when it appeared to be disabled because it had disappeared from view, the toolbar continued to track browsing behavior.3 As Google now hosts “trillions” of searches annually, its varied search-related tracking mechanisms combined with i
ts robust and nearly inescapable cookies (bits of tracking code inserted in your computer) ensure immense economies of scale that constitute the bedrock of Google’s supply operations.4
Figure 3: The Dynamic of Behavioral Surplus Accumulation
In 2015 internet legal scholar Tim Wu joined Harvard Business School’s Michael Luca and a team of data scientists from Yelp to research hidden mechanisms in Google Search that function, from our perspective, to expand crucial supply functions. They discovered that Google was systematically corrupting Search results to favor its own content and “downstream products”:
Google has begun to develop its own content over time, such as its own price results for shopping and its own reviews for local businesses.… Google is acting both as a search engine and a content provider. To use its search dominance to promote this content, Google has developed a feature called “universal search,” through which it intentionally excludes content competitors and only shows Google’s content.5
The ceaseless requirement for surplus at scale predicts corporate behavior that favors exclusivity. Because Search is the foundation of Google’s supply operations, the company has every incentive to entice users to its Search platform, content, and ancillary services and then to use its backstage “methods, apparatus, and data structures” for efficient extraction. The tilt toward exclusivity produces a range of practices considered “monopolistic” in the perspective of twentieth-century regulatory frameworks. These characterizations, while valid, omit the most-salient elements of the new order. The extraction imperative demands that everything be possessed. In this new context, goods and services are merely surveillance-bound supply routes. It’s not the car; it’s the behavioral data from driving the car. It’s not the map; it’s the behavioral data from interacting with the map. The ideal here is continuously expanding borders that eventually describe the world and everything in it, all the time.
The Age of Surveillance Capitalism Page 16
