The Age of Surveillance Capitalism

Class: PHIL-282
Author: Shoshana Zuboff
Title: The Age of Surveillance Capitalism

1. Google as the Pioneer of Surveillance Capitalism

Google is the pioneer of surveillance capitalism, just as Ford and GM were pioneers of mass-production capitalism.
Understanding Google's early practices helps explain this new form of capitalism.
Unlike Ford or GM leaders, Google's founders have been secretive about their methods. Key insights come from Hal Varian, Google's chief economist.

2. The Original "Behavioral Value Reinvestment Cycle"

Initially, Google used user data only to improve its services (e.g., better search results, spell check).
This was a balanced relationship: users provided data, and Google reinvested its value back into the user experience at no cost.
This created a symbiotic "reinvestment cycle" where Google and its users benefited mutually.
However, this cycle produced no profit or "surplus," as all value was consumed by service improvements. It was not yet capitalism.

3. The Crisis that Led to a Change

The dot-com bubble burst in 2000, creating immense financial pressure on Google from its investors.
Investors demanded "sustained and exponential profits," which Google's existing model could not deliver.
This financial emergency created a "state of exception," justifying a shift away from the company's founding principles, including its opposition to advertising.

4. The Discovery of "Behavioral Surplus"

Google realized that the vast amount of extra behavioral data it collected—the "data exhaust"—could be used for more than just service improvement.
This "behavioral surplus" was a zero-cost asset that could be repurposed to predict user behavior.
Google secretly began using this surplus to target ads with high precision, moving beyond simple keyword matching.
A key moment was analyzing search queries for "Carol Brady's maiden name," which revealed the immense predictive power of their data stores.

5. The New Logic: Extraction & Prediction for Profit

The core invention was using behavioral surplus to predict which users were most likely to click on an ad.
This transformed Google’s business model. Their actual customers became the advertisers, who paid for predictions about user behavior.
Users were no longer the primary focus but rather the source of free raw material for this new prediction factory.
This established the extraction imperative: the need to constantly acquire more behavioral surplus at an ever-expanding scale to improve predictions and, therefore, revenues.

6. Secrecy and the "Hiding Strategy"

Google understood that its new operations were invasive and depended on users not knowing the full extent of the data collection.
Leaders instituted a "hiding strategy". Employees were forbidden from speaking about the new methods.
The company used euphemisms like "digital exhaust" or "digital breadcrumbs" to make the expropriation of data seem harmless.
This secrecy was essential for the sustained accumulation of behavioral surplus.

7. Spreading the Model: Facebook and Beyond

This new logic of accumulation quickly became the default model for information capitalism.
Facebook was the first major company to adopt it after Google.
Google executive Sheryl Sandberg was hired by Facebook in 2008 and is described as the "Typhoid Mary" of surveillance capitalism for transferring this model.
She understood that Facebook’s "social graph" was an immense source of behavioral surplus that could be used not just to satisfy demand, but to create it.