Surveillance Capitalism

Last week I watched a PBS Frontline show about artificial intelligence. One person on the show (a little past midway) was Shoshana Zuboff, author of The Age of Surveillance Capitalism (link). It was the first time I heard the term surveillance capitalism. I was curious enough to borrow her book from the library and start reading it.

The book is long, nearly 500 pages plus acknowledgements, notes, and index. I agree with several of the reviews on Amazon that the book is twice as long as it needs to be. I read about half before finding that she was interviewed by Russ Roberts on his EconTalk blog (link) in July. I may not read the rest of the book, since I suspect there is little to learn that goes beyond what is in the EconTalk interview.

She presents surveillance capitalism as a new kind of capitalism, quite unlike, for example, industrial capitalism or the mass production capitalism of the first half of the 20th century. I believe surveillance assisted advertising would be more accurate, but not near as attention grabbing. According to her, "Surveillance capitalism claims private human experience for the market dynamic. And that private human experience is reinterpreted as a free source of raw material for translation into behavioral data."

Zuboff is very disturbed about it, enough to label it Big Other, an allusion to Big Brother. Online companies, especially Google and Facebook, can track users and collect personal information about them. Their purpose is to present ads for its advertisers, who want to sell goods or services to the users, and be paid revenues for doing so. Roberts asks her several times what is the harm in this. He agrees that advertising is often annoying and in rare circumstances might lead to harm, but in general, what is the enormous harm that Zuboff tries to portray? She doesn't answer his questions directly, but dances around the topic and moves on to talk about something else.

In its early years Google's mission was to create the best search engine. The user would enter search terms (keywords) and Google would hunt for and show the user the websites with the content most relevant to the keywords. However, this didn't yield much revenue. The Google founders at first disdained but then turned to advertising. By showing ads along with search results, Google could collect more revenue from advertisers, and Google desired the revenue to improve its search methods. At first searches and ads presented were based only on the keywords the user entered. Then Google decided that also getting and using info about the user could make the advertising more effective. The oft-used term is targeted advertising.

The metric of effectiveness is click-through rates, a topic Zuboff covers some. However, she says very little to quantify them. She does say click-through rates skyrocketed at Google and elsewhere after search engines started using personal information of users as well as keywords. What does "skyrocket" mean -- go from less than 1% to 1.5% or 1% to 2%? She mentions increases in her book, but not from x to x+Δx, only Δx. Anyway, she portrays the after state with generous helpings of the words certain and certainty. For example, she says to Russ Roberts: "What are these businesses selling? They are selling certainty. They are not selling certainty about, you know, oil futures or pork bellies or whatever. They are selling certainty about future human behavior. They are trying to get as close as possible to being able to guarantee outcomes to their business customers." Huh? A click-through rate of 1-2% or even 3% is certainty or a guarantee?

During her interview with Roberts she says: "[T]he impact was a revenue increase of 3,590%, just during those years 2000-2004." Okay, 36 or 37 times as much. What part was due to an increase in click-through rates versus the number of searches and how much Google charged advertisers for more prominent placement of ads?

Incidentally, as much as feasible, I use the Brave browser, search engine DuckDuckGo, and AdBlock Plus to minimize the barrage of advertising and other attempts at grabbing my attention when online. (Sometimes I use Google because it allows more detailed search terms and shows more results than DuckDuckGo.)