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Cyberspace is an important character in this drama, celebrated on the first page of Eric Schmidt and Jared Cohen’s book on the digital age: “The online world is not truly bound by terrestrial laws . . . it’s the world’s largest ungoverned space.”21 They celebrate their claim to operational spaces beyond the reach of political institutions: the twenty-first-century equivalent of the “dark continents” that drew nineteenth-century European speculators to their shores.
technology companies such as Google move faster than the state’s ability to understand or follow, that any attempts to intervene or constrain are therefore fated to be ill-conceived and stupid, that regulation is always a negative force that impedes innovation and progress, and that lawlessness is the necessary context for “technological innovation.”
“When asked about government regulation, Schmidt said that technology moves so fast that governments really shouldn’t try to regulate it because it will change too fast, and any problem will be solved by technology. ‘We’ll move much faster than any government.’”
“Old institutions like the law and so on aren’t keeping up with the rate of change that we’ve caused through technology. . . . The laws when we went public were 50 years old. A law can’t be right if it’s 50 years old, like it’s before the internet.”
Google and Facebook vigorously lobby to kill online privacy protection, limit regulations, weaken or block privacy-enhancing legislation, and thwart every attempt to circumscribe their practices because such laws are existential threats to the frictionless flow of behavioral surplus.28
Extraction quarry must be both unprotected and available at zero cost if this logic of accumulation is to succeed.
These claims to lawless space are remarkably similar to those of the robber barons of an earlier century.
As many legal scholars observe, the ideological orientation of contemporary First Amendment judicial reasoning asserts a close connection between free speech and property rights. The logic that links ownership to an absolute entitlement to freedom of expression has led to a privileging of corporate action as “speech” deserving of constitutional protection.
One result is that US courts have been “quick to see the possibilities of governmental overreach, but much less willing to see the problems of ‘private,’ let alone corporate, power.”45
In this context, surveillance capitalists vigorously developed a “cyberlibertarian” ideology that Frank Pasquale describes as “free speech fundamentalism.”
“The lawyers working for these companies have business reasons for supporting free expression. Indeed, all of these companies talk about their businesses in the language of free speech.”47
The Constitution is exploited to shelter a range of novel practices that are antidemocratic in their aims and consequences and fundamentally destructive of the enduring First Amendment values intended to protect the individual from abusive power.
“To sue an online platform over an obscene blog post would be like suing the New York Public Library for carrying a copy of Lolita.”
“With the attacks of September 11, 2001, everything changed. The new focus was overwhelmingly on security rather than privacy.”61 The privacy provisions debated just months earlier vanished from the conversation more or less overnight.
The 9/11 attacks transformed the government’s interest in Google, as practices that just hours earlier were careening toward legislative action were quickly recast as mission-critical necessities.
the NSA paid Google for a “search appliance capable of searching 15 million documents in twenty-four languages.” Google
78 In 2004 Google acquired Keyhole, a satellite mapping company founded by John Hanke, whose key venture backer was the CIA venture firm, In-Q-Tel. Keyhole would become the backbone for Google Earth, and Hanke would go on to lead Google Maps, including the controversial Street View Project.
Another legal scholar described the “collaboration” between Google and the intelligence community, especially the NSA, as “unprecedented.”85 During these years, scholars noted the growing interdependencies between the intelligence agencies, resentful of constitutional constraints on their prerogatives, and the Silicon Valley firms.86 The agencies craved the lawlessness that a firm such as Google enjoyed.
In his 2008 essay “The Constitution in the National Surveillance State,” law professor Jack Balkin observed that the Constitution inhibits government actors from high-velocity pursuit of their surveillance agenda, and this creates incentives for the government “to rely on private enterprise to collect and generate information for it.”
Google demonstrated that the same predictive knowledge derived from behavioral surplus that had made the surveillance capitalists wealthy could also help candidates win elections.
beginning with the 2008 Obama presidential campaign. Schmidt had a leading role in organizing teams and guiding the implementation of cutting-edge data strategies that would eclipse the traditional political arts with the science of behavioral prediction.
the 2008 Obama campaign compiled significant data on more than 250 million Americans, including “a vast array of online behavioral and relational data collected from use of the campaign’s web site and third-party social media sites such as Facebook.
“We knew who . . . people were going to vote for before they decided.”97
Once elected, Schmidt joined the Transition Economic Advisory Board and appeared next to Obama at his first postelection press conference.99 According to Politico, “The image alone of Schmidt standing elbow-to-elbow with Obama’s top economic thinkers was enough to send shivers up the spine of Google’s competitors. ‘This terrifies Microsoft,’ said a Democratic lobbyist familiar with the industry. ‘There’s a reason why people are scared to death of Google.’”100
Google won the right to put its self-driving cars on the road—anticipated
“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.”
Cornering practices are not designed to protect product niches but rather to protect critical supply routes for the unregulated commodity that is behavioral surplus.
The corporation unfairly impedes competitors in Search in order to protect the dominance of its most important supply route,
Google’s Android mobile platform offers an example of the governing role of surplus capture and defense. Internet use went mobile with the rise of the smartphone and the tablet, and Google was forced to find new ways to defend and expand its primary supply chain in Search. Android quickly became the corporation’s second critical supply route for behavioral surplus.
Unlike the iPhone, the Android platform was “open source,” which made it easy for applications developers around the world to create apps for Android users. Eventually, Google bundled this valuable new universe of apps into its Google Play store. Manufacturers who wanted to preinstall Google Play on their devices were required to license and install Google’s mobile services as exclusive or default capabilities: Search, Gmail, Google Pay, You-Tube, Google Maps, Google Photos, and whatever other supply routes happen to be in ascendance at the time.
In 2015 the team found that anyone who simply visited the 100 most popular websites would collect over 6,000 cookies in his or her computer, 83 percent of which were from third parties unrelated to the website that was visited. The census found “Google tracking infrastructure” on 92 of the top 100 sites and 923 of the top 1,000 sites, concluding that “Google’s ability to track users on popular websites is unparalleled, and it approaches the level of surveillance that only an Internet Service Provider can achieve.”
Its dispossession operations reveal a predictable sequence of stages that must be crafted and orchestrated in great detail in order to achieve their ultimate destination as a system of facts through which surplus extraction is normalized.
The four stages of the cycle are incursion, habituation, adaptation, and redirection. Taken together, these stages constitute a “theory of change” that describes and predicts dispossession
In a second stage the aim is habituation. Whereas lawsuits and investigations unwind at the tedious pace of democratic institutions, Google continues the development of its contested practices at high velocity.
The incursion itself, once unthinkable, slowly worms its way into the ordinary. Worse still, it gradually comes to seem inevitable.
Google had already taken everything on the web, but Street View and Google’s other mapping operations, Google Maps and Google Earth (the company’s 3-D view of the world using satellite and aerial imagery), announced an even-more-ambitious vision. Everything in the world was to be known and rendered by Google, accessed through Google, and indexed by Google in its infinite appetite for behavioral surplus.
what distinguishes Google’s maps from all others is the integration of its exclusive proprietary data from Street View. In other words, data compiled through public investments are augmented with data taken from a unilateral transfer of surplus behavior and decision rights. The composite results are then reclassified as private assets.
They reframed Street View from an edgy incursion circumventing resistance through stealth to an opulent VIP tent where businesses scrambled for an entry pass.
the migration from an online data source to a real-world monitor to an advisor to an active shepherd—from knowledge to influence to control. Ultimately, Street View’s elaborate data would become the basis for another complex of spectacular Google incursions: the self-driving car and “Google City,”
Glass was the harbinger of a new “wearables” platform that would help support the migration of behavioral surplus operations from the online to the offline world.81
The “Like” button, introduced widely in April 2010 as a communications tool among friends, presented an early opportunity for Facebook’s Zuckerberg to master the dispossession cycle.
In 2012 Facebook also gave advertisers access to targeting data that included users’ e-mail addresses, phone numbers, and website visits, and it admitted that its system scans personal messages for links to third-party websites and automatically registers a “like” on the linked web page.96 By 2014, the corporation announced that it would be tracking users across the internet using, among its other digital widgets, the “Like” button, in order to build detailed profiles for personalized ad pitches.
Another example of surveillance-as-a-service is a firm that sells deep vetting of potential employees and tenants to employers and landlords. For instance, a prospective tenant receives a demand from her potential landlord that requires her to grant full access to all social media profiles. The service then “scrapes your site activity,” including entire conversation threads and private messages, runs it through natural language processing and other analytic software, and finally spits out a report that catalogues everything from your personality to your “financial stress level,” including
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As in the case of digital lenders, although a prospective tenant must formally “opt in” to the service, it is those who have less money and fewer options who are trapped in this Faustian bargain in which privacy is forfeit to social participation. “People will give up their privacy to get something they want,” celebrates the CEO of this service firm.153
Only surveillance capital commands the material infrastructure and expert brainpower to rule the division of learning in society.
Investors deem Google “harder to catch than ever” because it is unmatched in its combination of infrastructure scale and science. Google is known as a “full stack AI company” that uses its own data stores “to train its own algorithms running on its own chips deployed on its own cloud.” Its dominance is further strengthened by the fact that machine learning is only as intelligent as the amount of data it has to train on, and Google has the most data.
In this hidden movement the competitive struggle over surveillance revenues reverts to the pre-Gutenberg order as the division of learning in society shades toward the pathological, captured by a narrow priesthood of privately employed computational specialists, their privately owned machines, and the economic interests for whose sake they learn.
As data scientist Pedro Domingos writes, “Whoever has the best algorithms and the most data wins. . . . Google with its head start and larger market share, knows better what you want . . . whoever learns fastest wins. . . .”
Surveillance capitalist firms, beginning with Google, dominate the accumulation and processing of information, especially information about human behavior.
The titanic power struggles of the twentieth century were between industrial capital and labor, but the twenty-first century finds surveillance capital pitted against the entirety of our societies, right down to each individual member.
