At the heart of the new age are novel configurations of fear, certainty, and power.

Shoshana Zuboff. The Age of Surveillance Capitalism. Public Affairs, 2019.

Today there is no more powerful corporation in the world than Google, so it may be hard to remember that not too long ago, the company was in a fight for its very existence. In its early years, Google couldn’t figure out how to make money. … Google engineers were aware that users’ search queries produced a great deal of “collateral data,” which they collected as a matter of course. Data logs revealed not only common keywords, but also dwell times and click patterns. This “data exhaust,” it began to dawn on some of Google’s executives, could be an immensely valuable resource for the company, since the data contained information that advertisers could use to target consumers. Read More