The Age of Surveillance Capitalism PDF

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Ch.3 The Discovery of Behavioral Surplus. 63-97 Introduction: In this chapter, the authors start by explaining the importance of Google in the process of the creation of surveillance capitalism by comparing it to Ford as the pioneer of mass manufacturing. (Google is the pioneer of surveillance capitalism) She then goes on explaining how we don't know much about Google as it is a secret company example giving the example of the lawsuit about a spying program inside the company against people who want to break this secrecy about the company. ● Applying the fundamentals of surveillance capitalism: - Data extraction and retrieving = Big Data which is the raw material to surveillance capitalism - Ai and machine learning are what transform the raw material into a product = targeted advertising ● The objective of the chapter: Reveil laws of motion that drive surveillance competition - Interrelation and Optimisation are the two factors that drive data mining - The argument is that capitalism is still alive (Maximize profit) but that its motion evolved to a market move.

Google's first phase: ● Data from online search was not collected at the beginning until Amit Patel arrived at Google and saw the potential in the data itself. Thus, not only people would search for things on the internet but also, each search could help improve future searches. This meant that the data could offer better service but also information on users’ search patterns. ● (Behavioral data = raw material -> Analyzing data (production) -> Service improvement data) ● User, not the product - Users are sources of raw material supplies (Surveillance capitalism) ● In the beginning, users needed the search as much as the search needed them (Fairtrade) & money was made out of paid search words.

Google's second phase: ● However, the need for better ROI for investors during the DOT-COM bubble forced Google’s management to rethink their business plan income streams. Targeted advertisements were created based on the behavioral data of the users to increase the profitability of adds. This was the start of surveillance capitalism.

● Google started using its data not only for search engine purposes but also to optimize targeted advertising based on Behavioral surplus. It is at this moment that Google’s profitability exploded us by retrieving data about people's every move at every time and place of the day. This gave google the tools to predict people's feeling and thinking. Thus, by using a tremendous amount of personal data and deep learning technologies, the author argues that Google has managed to be able to predict people’s future. ● At that point, advertisement became a science as with the use of the data it maximized the person's time and many more factors that maximized the efficiency of ads. Google started reading people's minds to predict their future wants. Behavioral Surplus = Prediction based on people's data from as many places as possible is really the basis of Surveillance capitalism.

Learning outcome: Behavioral data went from being used as an exchange between the users and the company to being used to predict future behavior making it the most powerful advertisement tool in the world as a high amount of data gives the possibility to companies like google to predict the future of people. Behavioral Data gave the possibility to a specific group of companies who control them to predict the future. (To a certain extent)

18. A Coup from Above. ● The “surveillance capitalism” of the title, which Zuboff defines as a “new economic order” and “an expropriation of critical human rights that is best understood as a coup from above”. ● It refers to global tech companies such as Google, Twitter, Facebook & Co. and how they persuaded us to give up our privacy for the sake of convenience; how personal information (“data”) gathered by these firms has been used by others not only to predict our behavior but also to influence and modify it; and how this has had disastrous consequences for democracy and freedom. ● The author argues that capitalism no longer functions with respect to these surveillance capitalist companies because they know more than the market based on their data analytics. Therefore, there is no market for other companies to effectively compete with them. Furthermore, these companies know so much more than any individual knows that the market doesn't function properly. Aristotle once said that people need rules to be good. And if you don't have rules people are the worst animal. But if they have rules, they can be the best. There might be a way to manage this

new system to our collective advantage. Getting rid of Google, Facebook & Co. wouldn’t solve the problem, but setting the right policies in place and managing those companies effectively and controlling them better would be worth a shot. Unlike industrial capitalism, which profits from exploiting natural resources and labor, surveillance capitalism profits from the capture, rendering, and analysis of behavioral data through ‘instrumentarium’ methods that are designed to cultivate ‘radical indifference […] a form of observation without witness’ (379). The surveillance capitalists found an untapped reservoir of information that their services were collecting for internal analytics and programming, and they saw an opportunity: they could sell that ‘data exhaust’ to advertisers. For them, the humans attached to that data are just accessories....