Behavioral surplus, Google's gold mine

Right here I published some considerations on the work of Shoshana Zuboff https://link.medium.com/DC0GHpAGv6. I return to the subject because it seemed essential to me to do justice to the author's greatest discovery: the behavioral surplus. This concept that is closely related to that of “added value” coined by Karl Marx to explain the way in which the capitalist accumulates unpaid work for workers.

To understand the elaboration of this concept, it is necessary to retrace the path taken by the company Google. And this is exactly what Zuboff did in his book:

“Operationally, this meant Google wold turn its growing cache of behabioral data and its computational power and expertize toward the single task of matching ads with queris. New rethoric took hold to legitimate this unusual move. If there was to be advertising, then it had to be ‘relevant’ to users. Ads would no longer be linked to keywords in a search querry, but rather a particulara ad would be ‘targeted’ to a particular individual. Securing this grail of advertising would ensure relevance to users and value to advertisers.

Absent from the new rhetoric was the fact thar in pursuing of this new aim, Google would cross into virgin territory by exploiting sensitivities that its exclusive and detailed collateral behavioral data about millions and later billions of users coud reveal. To meed the new objetive, the behavioral value reinvestment cycle was rapdly and secretly subordinated to a larger and more complex undertaking. The raw materials that had veen solely used to improve the quality of searchs resultes would now also be put to use in the service of targeting advertising to individual users. Some data would continue be applied to service improvement, but the growing stores of collateral signals would be repurposed to improve the profitability of ads for both Google and its adverisers. The behaviorial data aviable for users beyond service improvement constituted a surplus, and it was on the strength of this behavioral surplus that the young company would find its way to de ‘sustained and exponentional profits’ that would be ecessary for survival. Thanks to a perceived emergency, a new mutation began to gather forrm and quietly slip its moorings in the implicit advocacy-oriented social contract of the firm’s original relationship with users. (The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, Shoshana Zuboff, PublicAffairs, New York, 2019, p. 74/75)

Before starting to target advertising, Google used the collateral information produced by each search by users to improve the service that was provided. From the moment it was forced to face the crisis of the .com companies, Google started to use this information to extract economic value from the users' behavior revealed by the collateral information they produce. Thus, Google began to target them with personalized ads for goods and services that they would likely need, increasing the efficiency of advertising. This operation was patented.

“The techniques described in the patent meant thar each time a user queries Google’s search engine, the system simultaneously presents a specifc configuration of a particular ad, all in the fraction of a moment that it takes to fufill the search query. The data used to perform this instant translation from query to ad, a predictive analysis thar was dobbed ‘matching’ wen far beyond the mere denotation of search terms. New data sets werw compiled that would dramatically enhance the accuracy of these predictions. These data sets were referred to as ‘user profile information’ or “UPI”. These new data meant that there would be no more guesswork and far less waste in the advertising budget. Mathematical certainty would replace all of that.” (The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, Shoshana Zuboff, PublicAffairs, New York, 2019, p. 78)

When the user makes a search, his existing profile is formulated or consulted. When providing the answer to the query, Google adds product advertisements that may be of particular interest to that Internet user. Each time it use Google to search for any subject, the user will provide free personal information that will be added to the stockpile used to formulate the individual profile that will enable the company to make a profit by attaching targeted advertising to the query result. Each user of Google is a worker at the service of the segmentation of advertising exploited economically by the company.

“Google would no longer be a passive recipient of accidental data that it could recycle for the benefit of its users. The targeted advertising patent sheds light on the path discovery that Google traveled from its advocay-oriented founding toward the elaboration of behavioral surveillance as a full-blown logic of accumulation, The invent itself exposes the reasonig through which the behavioral value reinvestd cycle was subjugated to the service of a new commercial calculation. Behavioral data, whose value had previously been ‘use up’ on improving the quality of Search for users, now became the pivotal – and exclusive to Google – raw material for the construction of a dynamuc online advertising marketplace. Google would now secure more bahavioral data than it needed to serve its users. That surplus, behavioral surplus, was the game-changing, zero-cost asset that was divert from service improvement toward a genuine and highly lucrative market exchange.” (The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, Shoshana Zuboff, PublicAffairs, New York, 2019, p. 81)

Karl Marx defined “added value” as a portion of labor is not paid to the worker. This portion can be increased in two ways: an increase in working hours without a corresponding increase in salary; increased productivity during the same workday. The employer runs the company and is under no obligation to report the economic results to the employee. Therefore, in any case, the worker is never in a position to know what the exact difference was between his work that was paid and the amount accumulated by the employer. This ignorance is essential. It preserves the rationality of capitalism, as well as the hierarchy between the entrepreneur and the worker.

According to Shoshana Zuboff, something similar occurs in the dynamics of surveillance capitalism. Google appropriates collateral information produced by users and makes a profit without paying for it. What Google provides when returning each search, is only a portion of what was requested by the user (the information he requested). The surplus that was produced by the user himself (collateral information from his searches) is transformed into targeted advertising targeted at him at a profit for Google.

“Key to our conversation is this fact: surveillance capitalism was invented by a specific group of human beings in a specifc time and place. It is not an inherent result of digital technology, nor is it a necessary expression of information capitalism. It was intentionally construtcted at a moment in history, in much the same wat that the engenieers and tinkeres at the Ford Motor Company invented mass prodoction in the Detroit of 1913.” (The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, Shoshana Zuboff, PublicAffairs, New York, 2019, p. 85)

This is an important detail. Google invented a way to exploit its users without giving them any option not to provide collateral information, to prevent it from being used or to receive a sum due to the profit the company makes from exploiting it. This was not and is not inevitable. However, the path opened by Google would soon be explored by Facebook.

“… Once Google’s leadership undertood the commercial power of behavioral surplus, Schmidt instituted what he called the ‘hiding strategy’. Google employees were told not to speak about what the patent had referred to as its ‘novel methods, appararus, message formats and/or data strutures’ or confirm any rumors about flowing cash. Hiding was not a post hot strategy; it was baked into the cake that would became surveillence capitalism.” (The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, Shoshana Zuboff, PublicAffairs, New York, 2019, p. 88/89)

The virtuous circle is closed by trickery: concealment and ignorance. Just as the capitalist accumulates a portion of unpaid work that is ignored by the worker (Karl Marx), the Google user must ignore how he added value to the company himself without receiving in return a significant portion of the information he produced and was used to segment the advertising he receives along with the research results (Shoshana Zuboff).

The concept of "behavioral surplus" thus maintains a relationship with that of "added value", with one difference: the worker is paid for a portion of the work; the user receives absolutely nothing in return other than the advertising that he helped to target by providing collateral information free of charge when using Google.