(9) zuboff_ch3_pts_I-II-III.pdf
Chapter 3: Discovery of Behavioral Surplus

I. Google: The Pioneer of Surveillance Capitalism

tech companies are notoriously secret. Zuboff learned about Google's operations from articles published by Hal Varian.

Varian identifies four new uses: data extraction and analysis, new contractual forms for better monitoring, personalization and customization, and continuous experiments.

-Data equals raw material for the process
-extraction describe social relationships and infrastructure that grabs the data
-analysis refers to machine intelligence driven calculations
Google has long been especially deep into decisions by algorithm

Google's advances in advertising pale in comparison to their advances in machine learning in artificial intelligence – – the processes that drive surveillance capitalism.

Zuboff  proposes that form of capitalism presents a new logic for economics: a new set of laws of motion.

In effect, supply and demand get replaced by instrumentarian power that enacts surveillance capitalism by using behavior modification.

II. a balance of power
-each Google search creates a wake of collateral data: digital exhaust/behavioral byproducts that become behavioral surplus by way of data mining.

-The continuous flow of this data turns the search engine into a recursive learning system.
-Behavioral surplus gets reused in the behavioral value reinvestment cycle
-the notion that search and other online products and services are "free" is undermined by the fact that they are paid for, by users, when users provide their data for (in this case) Google's various analytical purposes.
-so the user is neither the customer, nor the product, but is the provider of raw material.

III. impatient money in the state of exception. 
-Google initially made very little money as their business model depended on licensing their search and selling some advertising by way of their Ad Words product.
	-AdWords encouraged people who made and hosted webpages to allow Google to place ads on their page by splitting some of the revenue with page producers.
-the bursting of the tech bubble produced a next central crisis in the Silicon Valley. Unprofitable companies were no longer well thought of. Google need to rethink their business model.