The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power

Chapter 3 analyzes Google as the starting point for the birth of surveillance capitalism. Incorporated in 1998 by Stanford graduate students Larry Page and Sergey Brin, Google began with the goal of perfecting an online search engine in order to make the wide base of world knowledge accessible to all. There was a balance of power in the dynamics between Google and its users in these early days of the business: Users needed Google to search and access online information, and Google needed its users’ behavioral data to improve its service.

By 1999, however, venture capitalists investing in Google pressured its creators to make the service more profitable. Impatient investors altered Google’s relationship to its user base, driving Google to invent targeted ads in an effort to increase profits. This meant that advertisers were Google’s customers, not its actual users.

Analysis of user behavioral data created new, efficient ads targeting individual users and broader demographics. Google then moved to using behavioral data for “matching,” so that the company could match ads to search queries and make ad engagement more likely. Users and their data then became the prime fuel for Google’s advertising gambit, which was given the name “AdSense.” This process of discovering and implementing behavioral surplus produced a 3,590% increase in revenue in under four years, with Zuboff noting, “By 2004, AdSense had achieved a run rate of a million dollars per day, and by 2010, it produced annual revenues of more than $10 billion” (84). With AdSense, Google identified precisely how profitable the exploitation of user data could be, paving the way for the future evolution of surveillance capitalism.

Because it made such a crucial discovery with AdSense and the profitability of user exploitation, Zuboff points to Google as the creator and current leader of surveillance capitalism. Google was—and still is—ahead of the curve of its competitors, including Facebook and Microsoft, due to its early research into behavioral data back in the 1990s.

Zuboff concludes her case study of Google by clearly delineating the operations of surveillance capitalism it unveiled. The economic logic—that behavioral surplus is the raw material exploited for profit by tech firms like Google—informs surveillance capitalism’s means of production, whereby artificial intelligence feeds on behavioral surplus to “learn” and become more accurate. This machine intelligence is used to create predictive products like AdSense which are designed off of behavioral surplus to predict what users will feel, think, and do. The final step in the operation of surveillance capitalism is the marketplace, where predictive products are sold to buyers interested in profitable applications of this predicted future behavior.

Building off Chapter 3’s outline of surveillance capitalism’s operations, Chapter 4 explains the sociopolitical circumstances that allowed surveillance capitalism to sprout and flourish in this way. Zuboff argues that there is a convergence of three forces that make up a fortress protecting surveillance capitalism from scrutiny and regulation. The first is surveillance capitalists’ use of the First Amendment to protect themselves in court. The second are specific historical events that influenced politics in surveillance capitalism’s favor. The final is the employment of social and cultural defenses and disseminations of surveillance capitalism’s ideology to ensure its defense and continual survival.

Google actively sought control of the public sphere to ensure its business strategies could not be regulated, thus cementing its lead in the surveillance capitalism market. It—along with its competitors—turned to lobbying the United States Congress to prevent the passage of laws pertaining to online privacy protections and secure their access to behavioral surplus.

As a result of this lobbying, Congressional statutes played a vital role in sheltering surveillance capitalism. This relationship between the state and surveillance capitalists strengthened due to historical circumstances. Neoliberalism’s rise in the late 20th century directly allowed for the mutation of surveillance capitalism because, according to Zuboff, it dictated that “regulatory interference [...] would only undermine competitive diversity” (108). Neoliberalism thus enforced the “hands off” approach to economic regulations that surveillance capitalism favored.

Furthermore, the September 11 attacks led to the rise of surveillance policies by the American government, creating an unprecedented need for surveillance capitalism’s predictive products on the national level. As the government sought to use the behavioral surplus of its own citizens for the supposed purpose of national security, it turned to Silicon Valley for help. Google was contracted to help the NSA and CIA build their own behavioral surplus analytical models. As the state formed its own need for surveillance technology, a phase of “surveillance exceptionalism” began; the government was willing to do anything to aggressively respond to 9/11, even at the expense of democracy’s health.

Next, surveillance capitalists turned to the cultural sphere as the final fortification strategy. Google continues to locate university professors who agree with their ideology of surveillance capitalism and funds their research so they can teach their values at conferences and in the classroom. With this final detail, the chapter cements the point that surveillance capitalism has been protected and actively nurtured by the historical events and corresponding sociopolitical forces that surround it.

Moving on in her process of detailing the foundational aspects of surveillance capitalism, Zuboff focuses on the forces that motivate surveillance capitalism—specifically, its need for as much behavioral surplus as it can capture. This dynamic of the extraction imperative forms a new, dangerously competitive market.

The majority of Chapter 5 defines and deconstructs the process of dispossession, a strategy relied on by surveillance capitalists to effectively extract behavioral surplus data. Zuboff argues that dispossession is a cycle which has four steps: incursion, habituation, adaptation, and redirection. To illustrate these concepts in action, Zuboff again looks to Google as a case study, with special focus on its Street View technology.

Street View’s incursion of invading private digital spaces without permission involved recording houses, streets, and neighborhoods across the world with cars and cameras, secretly stealing personal data through private Wi-Fi in the process. Google encouraged habituation and eventual acceptance of its bold data theft by purposefully evading or challenging inquiries made by democratic bodies like the FCC in an effort to extend forestall regulation, hoping that society would accept its behavior in the meantime.

Adaptation occurred when Google made pledges to reform its conduct to the public and begrudgingly complied to regulations forced on the firm by more than 12 countries across the globe. Simultaneously, however, Google enacted the final step of dispossession—redirection—by using all the data-gleaning strategies from Street View on a new service called Cartographer, a service that allowed for mapping interior spaces and following peoples’ movements.

Here, Zuboff’s analyzes former Google CEO Eric Schmidt’s relationship with Obama. Schmidt played a significant role in Obama’s election, leading Obama’s 2008 campaign to compile data on hundreds of million Americans through third-party sites like Facebook; Zuboff quotes one of Obama’s consultants as saying, “We knew who [...] people were going to vote for before they decided” (121). Even past helping him get elected, Zuboff investigates how Schmidt’s relationship with the President extended into influencing federal policies: The CEO gained a seat on Obama’s Transition Economic Advisory Board, illustrating how surveillance capitalists infiltrate America’s democratic infrastructure and seek to influence the highest seats of power. Furthermore, there was a significant exchange of staff between Google and the Obama administration, amplifying the scale of mutual benefits shared between tech firms and the United States government under surveillance capitalism. Zuboff’s research into such dynamics and incorporations of firm data—such as how many Americans President Obama compiled data from, or how many White House staff members left to work for Google—serves as the lynchpin for Part 1’s political analysis, revealing in full depth how surveillance capitalism operates in American society.

Zuboff also paints to smaller but equally troubling developments in surveillance capitalism, including a 2015 Windows 10 update that fed greater amounts of behavioral data to Microsoft.

Towards the end of her chapter, Zuboff notes that the fiercely competitive behavioral surplus market has expanded to include industries such as cable and telecommunications. She relies on Verizon’s habitual tracking of user data on its smartphones and tablets as an example, warning that as this market grows more competitive and new companies and sectors are drawn to surveillance revenue, the monster of surveillance capitalism will grow to be so big that it will bleed into “real life”—outside of our computer screens. This process has already begun, Zuboff adds. 

The final chapter of Part 1 summarizes the social repercussions of surveillance capitalism’s operations and dynamics. Zuboff opens by arguing that surveillance capitalism lays claim to society in the same way that colonizers did during the 18th and 19th centuries through a three-step conquest pattern: the invention of legal rationale to justify an invasion of territory, declarations of claims to said territory, and the founding of a new town to legitimate the invasion and conquest.

Surveillance capitalism makes declarations of conquest to our lives and personal data. There are six declarations of conquest in surveillance capitalism: claiming individuals’ lived experiences as raw material that is free for the taking; asserting the right to translate lived experiences into behavioral data; asserting the right to own that data; asserting the right to decide how to analyze the data and determine what it indicates; asserting the right to decide how to use this knowledge; and finally, to fight for, construct, and defend conditions that will ensure surveillance capitalism’s survival.

These declarations create “unprecedented concentrations of knowledge and power” by “achiev[ing] dominance over the division of learning in society” (175). According to Zuboff, this is the most alarming social effect of surveillance capitalism because it controls which individuals know certain bodies of information, who has the authority to determine individuals’ access to bodies of information, and who has the power to bestow this authority to determine who knows what.

These bodies of information that determine surveillance capitalism’s power dynamics are what Zuboff refers to as “the two texts” (175). The first text is the public-facing text, meaning material such as posts, tweets, “likes,” blogs, and other content that can be accessed by anybody with an internet connection. The second text is essentially a “shadow” of the first: it is the collective behavioral data reflected by posts, videos, and likes, all of which are ripe for behavioral surplus extraction. This second text represents the division of knowledge present in surveillance capitalism’s power dynamics, where only those at the top of this unprecedented economic food chain can access and profit off this second layer of knowledge present in society’s body of information. Zuboff argues that this division of knowledge represents an asymmetry of power, favoring the surveillance capitalists and putting them in the position to continue asserting the six declarations that invade individuals’ lives and online privacy.

Part 1 closes by emphasizing the unprecedented nature of surveillance capitalism and reiterating that because it is not yet fully understood, any effort to regulate it will fail. Instead, Zuboff insists, only collective social action can achieve real change and reclaim a democratic future.