There is a dawning awareness that the technology company Google is forging a new kingdom on the strength of a different kind of power – ubiquitous, hidden and unaccountable.
If successful the dominion of this digital kingdom will exceed anything the world has known, because accessing the web and the wider internet has become essential for effective social participation across much of the world.
A BBC poll conducted in 2010 found 79 per cent of people in 26 countries considered access to the internet to be a fundamental human right. We rely on Google’s tools as we search, learn, connect, communicate and transact. The chilling irony is that we have become dependent on the internet to enhance our lives but the very tools we use there threaten to remake society in ways we do not understand and have not chosen.
If there is a single word to describe Google it is "absolute". The Encyclopaedia Britannica defines absolutism as a system in which "the ruling power is not subject to regularised challenge or check by any other agency".
Six years ago I asked Google chief executive Eric Schmidt what corporate innovations the company was putting in place to ensure its interests were aligned with those of its end users. Would it betray their trust? Back then his answer stunned me as the quintessence of absolutism: “Trust me: I know best.”
At that moment I knew I was in the presence of something new and dangerous, the effects of which reached beyond narrow economic contests and into the heart of everyday life.
Google’s rapid rise to power was possible because it ventured into a blank area of our society, the online world where earlier meanings and practices no longer applied but where new ones had yet to be created. Google colonised the blank space at high speed without challenge or impediment. Google did not ask permission, seek consensus, elicit opinion or even make visible its rules and ramparts. How did this occur?
As pressures for profit increased, Google, Facebook and others shifted to an advertising model that required the covert capture of user data as the currency for ad sales. Profits rapidly materialised and motivated ever more ruthless and determined data collection. The new science of data mining exploded, driven in part by Google’s spectacular success.
The networked surveillance sphere
The whole topography of cyberspace then began to morph as Google and Facebook developed a wholly new business logic that incorporated elements of the conventional logic of corporate capitalism – especially its adversarialism toward end consumers – along with elements from the new internet world – especially its intimacy. The outcome was a new dimension of cyberspace: the networked surveillance sphere. It expresses a new commercial logic based on hidden surveillance. Most people did not understand that they and their friends were being tracked, parsed and mined without their knowledge or consent.
Google street view, launched in 2007, is an example of the company’s absolutism. It didn’t ask if it could photograph homes for public consumption, it just took what it wanted and waited for any resistance to exhaust itself in defeat. Ultimately street view would face protests and restrictions in many countries across the European Union as well as Japan and Canada.
In 2010, Google established a partnership with the US National Security Agency. Thanks to the revelations of whistleblower Edward Snowden we now know the NSA developed its own software to mimic the Google infrastructure, uses Google “cookies” to identify targets for hacking and widely accesses email and other data through the Prism programme.
We often hear that our privacy rights have been eroded and secrecy has grown. But that obscures what is really at stake. Google, the NSA and others have accumulated privacy rights, mostly by taking ours without asking. They also manufactured new rights for themselves the way a forger might print currency, to assert a right to privacy with respect to their surveillance tactics and then exercise their choice to keep those tactics secret.
Finally – and this is key – the new concentration of privacy rights is institutionalised in the automatic, undetectable functions of a global infrastructure that most of the world’s people also happen to think is essential for basic social participation: the internet.
Unfortunately, the situation is about to get worse as Google’s radical politics spread from cyberspace to the real world.
What is Google up to next? We know it is secret, but here is how it looks to me. Google is no longer content with the data business. Its next step is to build an even more radical “reality business”, where the payoff is in data patterns that shape real-life behaviour of people in millions of ways that drive revenue to Google.
Google’s ambitions in this new arena appear to be limitless. The firm has purchased most of the top machine learning and robotics companies to build what has been described as the “greatest artificial intelligence laboratory on earth”. It paid richly for Nest Labs, a firm at the forefront of smart devices for the home and considered essential in the new Internet of Things – the network of smart sensors and internet-enabled devices intended as an intelligent infrastructure for all objects and even bodies. From your baby’s nappies to your refrigerator, heating system to artificial knee – all will be part of a smart neural network in which you breathe, eat, sleep, travel and work. Google and others will make money knowing, manipulating, controlling, slicing and dicing all of it.
'Reality' reborn as 'behaviour'
"Reality" is about to be turned into a commodity and reborn as "behaviour". We are beyond the realm of economics here. This is not merely a conversation about free markets: it's a conversation about free people.
Issues have shifted from 20th-century debates of monopolies of products or services to 21st-century monopolies of rights: rights to privacy and rights to reality. These new forms of power, poorly understood except by their own practitioners, threaten the sovereignty of the democratic social contract.
Things are moving fast. This is why the world is now looking to the EU – not to Google – to reverse the growing menace of absolutism and the monopoly of rights. The EU can assert the dominion of democratic rights and the principles of a fair marketplace. These are the precious victories of a centuries-long struggle and we dare not abandon them now.
Shoshana Zuboff is the author of The Summons: Our Fight for the Soul of an Information Civilisation (forthcoming, 2015). She is the Charles Edward Wilson Professor of Business Administration (retired) at the Harvard Business School and a faculty associate at the Berkman Centre for Internet and Society at the Harvard Law School. @shoshanazuboff
See also Weekend p4
