The Age of Surveillance Capitalism

by Shoshana Zuboff

  49. Bharat, Lawrence, and Sahami, 15.

  50. Bharat, Lawrence, and Sahami, 18.

  51. Bharat, Lawrence, and Sahami, 12.

  52. Bharat, Lawrence, and Sahami, 12 (italics mine).

  53. Empirical work suggests the primacy of decision rights in users’ privacy assessments. See Laura Brandimarte, Alessandro Acquisti, and George Loewenstein, “Misplaced Confidences: Privacy and the Control Paradox,” Social Psychological and Personality Science 4, no. 3 (2010): 340–47.

  54. Bharat, Lawrence, and Sahami, Generating user information, 17 (italics mine).

  55. Bharat, Lawrence, and Sahami, 16–17. The list of attributes included the content (e.g., words, Anchortext, etc.) of websites that the user has visited (or visited in a certain time period); demographic information; geographic information; psychographic information; previous queries (and/or associated information) that the user has made; information about previous advertisements that the user has been shown, has selected, and/or has made purchases after viewing; information about documents (e.g., word processor files) viewed/requested and/or edited by the user; user interests; browsing activity; and previous purchasing behavior.

  56. Bharat, Lawrence, and Sahami, Generating user information, 13.

  57. Douglas Edwards, I’m Feeling Lucky (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2011), 268.

  58. Levy, In the Plex, 101.

  59. The term is discussed in a video interview with Eric Schmidt and his colleague/coauthor Jonathan Rosenberg. See Eric Schmidt and Jonathan Rosenberg, “How Google Works,” interview by Computer History Museum, October 15, 2014, https://youtu.be/3tNpYpcU5s4?t=3287.

  60. See, for example, Edwards, I’m Feeling Lucky, 264–70.

  61. See Levy, In the Plex, 13, 32, 35, 105–6 (quotation from 13); John Battelle, The Search: How Google and Its Rivals Rewrote the Rules of Business and Transformed Our Culture (New York: Portfolio, 2006), 65–66, 74, 82; Auletta, Googled.

  62. See Levy, In the Plex, 94.

  63. Humphreys, “Legalizing Lawlessness.”

  64. Michael Moritz, “Much Ventured, Much Gained,” interview, Foreign Affairs, February 2015, https://www.foreignaffairs.com/interviews/2014-12-15/much-ventured-much-gained.

  65. Hounshell, From the American System, 247–48.

  66. Hounshell, 10.

  67. Richard S. Tedlow, Giants of Enterprise: Seven Business Innovators and the Empires They Built (New York: HarperBusiness, 2003), 159–60; Donald Finlay Davis, Conspicuous Production: Automobiles and Elites in Detroit 1899–1933 (Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 1989), 122.

  68. David M. Kristol, “HTTP Cookies: Standards, Privacy, and Politics,” ArXiv:Cs/0105018, May 9, 2001, http://arxiv.org/abs/cs/0105018.

  69. Richard M. Smith, “The Web Bug FAQ,” Electronic Frontier Foundation, November 11, 1999, https://w2.eff.org/Privacy/Marketing/web_bug.html.

  70. Kristol, “HTTP Cookies,” 9–16; Richard Thieme, “Uncompromising Position: An Interview About Privacy with Richard Smith,” Thiemeworks, January 2, 2000, http://www.thiemeworks.com/an-interview-with-richard-smith.

  71. Kristol, “HTTP Cookies,” 13–15.

  72. “Amendment No. 9 to Form S-1 Registration Statement Under the Securities Act of 1933 for Google Inc.,” Securities and Exchange Commission, August 18, 2004, https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1288776/000119312512025336/d260164d10k.htm.

  73. Henry Ford, “Mass Production,” Encyclopedia Britannica (New York: Encyclopedia Britannica, 1926), 821, http://memory.loc.gov/cgi-bin/query/h?ammem/coolbib:@field(NUMBER+@band(amrlg+lg48)).

  74. See Levy, In the Plex, 69.

  75. Edwards, I’m Feeling Lucky, 340–45.

  76. Battelle, The Search.

  77. Levy, In the Plex, 69.

  78. See Hansell, “Google’s Toughest Search.”

  79. See Markoff and Zachary, “In Searching the Web.”

  80. William O. Douglas, “Dissenting Statement of Justice Douglas, Regarding Warden v. Hayden, 387 U.S. 294” (US Supreme Court, April 12, 1967), https://www.law.cornell.edu/supremecourt/text/387/294; Nita A. Farahany, “Searching Secrets,” University of Pennsylvania Law Review 160, no. 5 (2012): 1271.

  81. George Orwell, Politics and the English Language (Peterborough: Broadview, 2006).

  82. A typical example is this statement from the Economist: “Google exploits information that is a by-product of user interactions, or data exhaust, which is automatically recycled to improve the service or create an entirely new product.” “Clicking for Gold,” Economist, February 25, 2010, http://www.economist.com/node/15557431.

  83. Valliere and Peterson, “Inflating the Bubble,” 1–22.

  84. See Lev Grossman, “Exclusive: Inside Facebook’s Plan to Wire the World,” Time.com (blog), December 2015, http://time.com/facebook-world-plan.

  85. David Kirkpatrick, The Facebook Effect: The Inside Story of the Company That Is Connecting the World (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2011), 257.

  86. Kirkpatrick, The Facebook Effect, 80; Auletta, Googled.

  87. See Auletta, Googled.

  88. Kirkpatrick, The Facebook Effect, 266.

  89. “Selected Financial Data for Alphabet Inc.,” Form 10-K, Commission File, United States Securities and Exchange Commission, December 31, 2016, https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1652044/000165204417000008/goog10-kq42016.htm#s58C60B74D56A630AD6EA2B64F53BD90C. According to Alphabet’s account in 2016, its revenues were $90,272,000,000. This included “Google segment revenues of $89.5 billion with revenue growth of 20% year over year and Other Bets revenues of $0.8 billion with revenue growth of 82% year over year.” Google Segment advertising revenues were $79,383,000,000, or 88.73 percent of Google Segment revenues.

  90. “Google Search Statistics—Internet Live Stats,” Internet Live Stats, September 20, 2017, http://www.internetlivestats.com/google-search-statistics; Greg Sterling, “Data: Google Monthly Search Volume Dwarfs Rivals Because of Mobile Advantage,” Search Engine Land, February 9, 2017, http://searchengineland.com/data-google-monthly-search-volume-dwarfs-rivals-mobile-advantage-269120. This translated into 76 percent of all desktop searches and 96 percent of mobile searches in the US and corresponding shares of 87 percent and 95 percent worldwide.

  91. Roben Farzad, “Google at $400 Billion: A New No. 2 in Market Cap,” BusinessWeek, February 12, 2014, http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2014-02-12/google-at-400-billion-a-new-no-dot-2-in-market-cap.

  92. “Largest Companies by Market Cap Today,” Dogs of the Dow, 2017, https://web.archive.org/web/20180701094340/http://dogsofthedow.com/largest-companies-by-market-cap.htm.

  93. Jean-Charles Rochet and Jean Tirole, “Two-Sided Markets: A Progress Report,” RAND Journal of Economics 37, no. 3 (2006): 645–67.

  94. For a discussion on this point and its relation to online target advertising, see Katherine J. Strandburg, “Free Fall: The Online Market’s Consumer Preference Disconnect” (working paper, New York University Law and Economics, October 1, 2013).

  95. Kevin Kelly, “The Three Breakthroughs That Have Finally Unleashed AI on the World,” Wired, October 27, 2014, https://www.wired.com/2014/10/future-of-artificial-intelligence.

  96. Xiaoliang Ling et al., “Model Ensemble for Click Prediction in Bing Search Ads,” in Proceedings of the 26th International Conference on World Wide Web Companion, 689–98, https://doi.org/10.1145/3041021.3054192.

  97. Ruoxi Wang et al., “Deep & Cross Network for Ad Click Predictions,” ArXiv:1708.05123 [Computer Science. Learning], August 16, 2017, http://arxiv.org/abs/1708.05123.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  1. See Steven Levy, “Secret of Googlenomics: Data-Fueled Recipe Brews Profitability,” Wired, May 22, 2009, http://archive.wired.com/culture/culture reviews/magazine/17-06/nep_googlenomics.

  2. Douglas Edwards, I’m Feeling Lucky (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2011), 291.

  3. Karl Polanyi, The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of Our Time, 2nd ed. (Boston: Beacon, 2001), 75–76.


  4. Karl Marx, Capital, trans. David Fernbach, 3rd ed. (Penguin, 1992), Chapter 6.

  5. Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (New York: Schocken, 2004), 198.

  6. Michael J. Sandel, What Money Can’t Buy: The Moral Limits of Markets (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2013).

  7. David Harvey, The New Imperialism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005), 153.

  8. Sergey Brin, “2004 Founders’ IPO Letter,” Google, https://abc.xyz/investor/founders-letters/2004.

  9. Cato Institute, Eric Schmidt Google/Cato Interview, YouTube, 2014, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BH3vjTz8OII.

  10. Nick Summers, “Why Google Is Issuing a New Kind of Toothless Stock,” Bloomberg.com, April 3, 2014, https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2014-04-03/why-google-is-issuing-c-shares-a-new-kind-of-powerless-stock. When shareholders objected to the system at the company’s annual general meeting by casting 180 million votes for an equal-voting-rights resolution, they were swamped by the 551 million votes owned by the founders.

  11. Eric Lam, “New Google Share Classes Issued as Founders Cement Grip,” Bloomberg.com, April 3, 2014, https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2014-04-03/new-google-shares-hit-market-as-founders-cement-grip-with-split.

  12. Tess Townsend, “Alphabet Shareholders Want More Voting Rights but Larry and Sergey Don’t Want It That Way,” Recode, June 13, 2017, https://www.recode.net/2017/6/13/15788892/alphabet-shareholder-proposals-fair-shares-counted-equally-no-supervote.

  13. Ronald W. Masulis, Cong Wang, and Fei Xie, “Agency Problems at Dual-Class Companies,” Journal of Finance 64, no. 4 (2009): 1697–1727, https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1540-6261.2009.01477.x; Randall Smith, “One Share, One Vote?” Wall Street Journal, October 28, 2011, https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424052970203911804576653591322367506. In 2017 Snap’s IPO offered only nonvoting shares, leaving its founders with 70 percent control of all votes and the remainder in the hand of pre-IPO investors. See Maureen Farrell, “In Snap IPO, New Investors to Get Zero Votes, While Founders Keep Control,” Wall Street Journal, January 17, 2017, http://www.wsj.com/articles/in-snap-ipo-new-investors-to-get-zero-votes-while-founders-keep-control-148 4568034. Other IPOs featured super-voting shares with as many as thirty to ten thousand times as many votes per share as the ordinary class of stock. See Alfred Lee, “Where Supervoting Rights Go to the Extreme,” Information, March 22, 2016.

  14. “Power Play: How Zuckerberg Wrested Control of Facebook from His Shareholders,” VentureBeat (blog), February 2, 2012, https://venturebeat.com/2012/02/01/zuck-power-play.

  15. Spencer Feldman, “IPOs in 2016 Increasingly Include Dual-Class Shareholder Voting Rights,” Securities Regulation & Law Report, 47 SRLR 1342, July 4, 2016; R. C. Anderson, E. Ottolenghi, and D. M. Reeb, “The Extreme Control Choice,” paper presented at the Research Workshop on Family Business, Lehigh University, 2017.

  16. Adam Hayes, “Facebook’s Most Important Acquisitions,” Investopedia, February 11, 2015, http://www.investopedia.com/articles/investing/021115/facebooks-most-important-acquisitions.asp; Rani Molla, “Google Parent Company Alphabet Has Made the Most AI Acquisitions,” Recode, May 19, 2017, https://www.recode.net/2017/5/19/15657758/google-artificial-intelligence-ai-investments; “The Race for AI: Google, Baidu, Intel, Apple in a Rush to Grab Artificial Intelligence Startups,” CB Insights Research, July 21, 2017, http://www.cbinsights.com/research/top-acquirers-ai-startups-ma-timeline.

  17. “Schmidt: We Paid $1 Billion Premium for YouTube,” CNET, March 27, 2018, https://www.cnet.com/news/schmidt-we-paid-1-billion-premium-for-youtube.

  18. Adrian Covert, “Facebook Buys WhatsApp for $19 Billion,” CNNMoney, February 19, 2014, http://money.cnn.com/2014/02/19/technology/social/facebook-whatsapp/index.html.

  19. Tim Fernholz, “How Mark Zuckerberg’s Control of Facebook Lets Him Print Money,” Quartz (blog), March 27, 2014, https://qz.com/192779/how-mark-zuckerbergs-control-of-facebook-lets-him-print-money.

  20. Duncan Robinson, “Facebook Faces EU Fine Over WhatsApp Data-Sharing,” Financial Times, December 20, 2016, https://www.ft.com/content/f652746c-c6a4-11e6-9043-7e34c07b46ef; Tim Adams, “Margrethe Vestager: ‘We Are Doing This Because People Are Angry,’” Observer, September 17, 2017, http://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/sep/17/margrethe-vestager-people-feel-angry-about-tax-avoidance-european-competition-commissioner; “WhatsApp FAQ—How Do I Choose Not to Share My Account Information with Facebook to Improve My Facebook Ads and Products Experiences?” WhatsApp.com, August 28, 2016, https://www.whatsapp.com/faq/general/26000016.

  21. Eric Schmidt and Jared Cohen, The New Digital Age: Transforming Nations, Businesses, and Our Lives (New York: Vintage, 2014).

  22. Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 183.

  23. Vinod Khosla, “Fireside Chat with Google Co-Founders, Larry Page and Sergey Brin,” Khosla Ventures, July 3, 2014, http://www.khoslaventures.com/fireside-chat-with-google-co-founders-larry-page-and-sergey-brin.

  24. Holman W. Jenkins, “Google and the Search for the Future,” Wall Street Journal, August 14, 2010, http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424052748704901104575423294099527212.

  25. See Lillian Cunningham, “Google’s Eric Schmidt Expounds on His Senate Testimony,” Washington Post, September 30, 2011, http://www.washingtonpost.com/national/on-leadership/googles-eric-schmidt-expounds-on-his-senate-testimony/2011/09/30/gIQAPyVgCL_story.html.

  26. Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry, “Eric Schmidt to World Leaders at EG8: Don’t Regulate Us, or Else,” Business Insider, May 24, 2011, http://www.businessinsider.com/eric-schmidt-google-eg8-2011-5.

  27. See Jay Yarow, “Google CEO Larry Page Wants a Totally Separate World Where Tech Companies Can Conduct Experiments on People,” Business Insider, May 16, 2013, http://www.businessinsider.com/google-ceo-larry-page-wants-a-place-for-experiments-2013-5.

  28. Conor Dougherty, “Tech Companies Take Their Legislative Concerns to the States,” New York Times, May 27, 2016, http://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/28/technology/tech-companies-take-their-legislative-concerns-to-the-states.html; Tim Bradshaw, “Google Hits Out at Self-Driving Car Rules,” Financial Times, December 18, 2015, http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/d4afee02-a517-11e5-97e1-a754d5d9538c.html?ftcamp=crm/email/20151217/nbe/InTodaysFT/product#axzz3ufyqWRo2; Jon Brodkin, “Google and Facebook Lobbyists Try to Stop New Online Privacy Protections,” Ars Technica, May 24, 2017, https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2017/05/google-and-facebook-lobbyists-try-to-stop-new-online-privacy-protections.

  29. Robert H. Wiebe, The Search for Order: 1877–1920 (New York: Hill and Wang, 1967), 135–37. Wiebe summarizes the worldview put forth by the millionaires as they coordinated to repulse the electoral threat to industrial capital, and it will sound familiar to anyone who has read the justifications of the Silicon Valley tycoons and their adulation of all things “destructive” and “entrepreneurial.” According to the nineteenth-century catechism, only the “highest types of their race discovered more effective ways to combine land, labor, and capital, and drew society upward as the rest reorganized behind their leaders.” The majority of “ordinary talent” was left to divide what remained after the requirements of capital, and “the weakest simply disappeared.” The result was to be “an ever improving race winnowed by competition.” Any violation of these “natural laws” would only benefit “the survival of the unfittest” and reverse the evolution of the race.

  30. David Nasaw, “Gilded Age Gospels,” in Ruling America: A History of Wealth and Power in a Democracy, ed. Steve Fraser and Gary Gerstle (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005), 124–25.

  31. Nasaw, “Gilded Age,” 132.

  32. Nasaw, 146.

  33. Lawrence M. Friedman, American Law in the 20th Century (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2004), 15–28.

  34. Nasaw, “Gilded Age,” 148.

  35. For two outstanding discussions, see Chris Jay Hoofnagle, Federal Trade Commission: Privacy Law and Policy (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2016); Julie E. Cohen, “The Regula
tory State in the Information Age,” Theoretical Inquiries in Law 17, no. 2 (2016), http://www7.tau.ac.il/ojs/index.php/til/article/view/1425.

  36. Jodi L. Short, “The Paranoid Style in Regulatory Reform,” Hastings Law Journal 63 (January 12, 2011): 633.

  37. For a wonderful collection of essays on this subject, see Steve Fraser and Gary Gerstle, eds., The Rise and Fall of the New Deal Order 1930–1980 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1989).

  38. Alan Brinkley, Liberalism and Its Discontents (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000).

  39. Short, “The Paranoid Style,” 44–46.

  40. Short, 52–53. Economic historian Philip Mirowski summarizes the “metatheses” that since the 1980s helped to constitute neoliberalism as a loose “paradigm,” despite its amorphous, multifaceted, and sometimes contradictory theories and practices. Among these, several became essential shelter for the surveillance capitalists’ bold actions, secret operations, and rhetorical misdirection: (1) democracy was to be constrained in favor of actively reconstructing the state as the agent of a stable market society; (2) the entrepreneur and the corporation were conflated, enshrining “corporate personhood,” rather than the rights of citizens, as the focus of legal protections; (3) freedom was defined negatively, as “freedom from” interference in the natural laws of competition, and all control was understood as coercive, except for market control; and (4) inequality of wealth and rights was accepted and even celebrated as a necessary feature of a successful market system and a force for progress. Later, surveillance capitalism’s success, its aggressive rhetoric, and its leaders’ willingness to fight every challenge, both in the courts and in the court of public opinion, further cemented these guiding principles in US politics, economic policies, and regulatory approaches. See Philip Mirowski, Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste: How Neoliberalism Survived the Financial Meltdown (London: Verso, 2013). See also Wendy Brown, Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism’s Stealth Revolution (New York: Zone Books, 2015); David M. Kotz, The Rise and Fall of Neoliberal Capitalism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2015), 166–75.