When Google becomes God

THE AGE OF SURVEILLANCE CAPITALISM:
The fight for a human future at the new frontier of power
By Shoshana Zuboff
Profile Books. 691 pages. £10.99
ISBN 978 1 781 256 855

The 21st century is already the digital century. The internet and its search engines have opened up an extraordinary abundance of new possibilities. We innocently revel in it all. But is it time to take action in terms of digital self-defence? This book, by a Professor Emerita from Harvard Business School, published last January, answers with a resounding ‘Yes!’

Companies like Google, Facebook and Amazon are not only shutting down our High Streets, but inexorably moving towards knowing far too much about us. Through our use of their services, data is harvested and processed using statistical methods related to behavioural science, to produce profiles of us which are such that they literally know more about us than we do of ourselves. This, of course, is exploited for financial gain. Such profiles are sold to advertisers and those with political interests who wish to influence us. In the eyes of the author of this book this is beginning to pose a threat to what it means to be human – something in which Christians ought to be intensely interested.

A story of the self

Zuboff frames the story she has to tell in terms of the emerging of a new modernity. ‘The first modernity suppressed the growth and expression of the self in favour of collective solutions, but in the second modernity, the self is all we have.’ It was into this culture of intense self-awareness and self-worth that digital technology, with its innumerable individualistic services, burst. It was tailor made for ‘lovers of self’ (2 Tim. 3:2).   

In 1998 Google became an incorporated company with a mission to liberate information and make it available worldwide. But as people searched the web they left their own footprints. ‘For example, in addition to key words, each Google search query produces a wake of collateral data such as the number and pattern of search terms, how the query is phrased, spelling, punctuation, dwell times, click patterns and location.’ To begin with this extra information was stored but ignored. It was a young Stanford University graduate, Amit Patel, who it seems, first saw that this ‘accidental’ information could be put to use. He concluded ‘that detailed stories about each user – thoughts, feelings, interests – could be constructed from the wake of unstructured signals that trailed every online transaction.’ 

Turning advertising into a science

To begin with this behavioural data was used entirely on the users behalf to enhance services. But Google and companies like them had investors anxious to make big money. Where was that to come from? As it stood, Google did not really sell much. They sold advertising, with the advertisers choosing how to market themselves. But in 2000 the great change came. Experts in behavioural prediction were employed and the users’ web footprints would be used. ‘This meant that Google would turn its own growing cache of behavioural data and its computational power and expertise towards the single task of matching ads to queries… Adverts would no longer be linked to key words but rather, knowing the user with increasing accuracy every time he/she searched the web, the advert would now be ‘targeted’ at particular individuals who were likely to be responsive. ‘Securing this holy grail of advertising would ensure relevance to users and value to advertisers.’ Up to this point advertising had always been thought of as an art, now it was a science.

And now there was something to sell beyond mere advertising space. It was personal data which ensured a high ‘click-through rate’ to people purchasing products online. By 2002 what has come to be known as ‘surveillance capitalism’ had taken root and began to make exponential profits. The guesswork as to whether a product would sell was more or less gone. But what was really now being sold was knowledge of other people. Information about individuals had become a commodity in the market place.

Contracts?

When we sign up for some online service, there is usually a contract to which we agree to by clicking a box. Hardly anyone reads these contracts – life is too short. They include undertakings about the use of data. Zuboff says that these contracts became incredibly one-sided in favour of the companies. There have been various courtroom battles over privacy and the right to have our data ‘forgotten’ – the oft cited acronym GDPR stands for General Data Protection Regulation. But Zuboff is skeptical of outcomes. In April 2018, ‘Facebook’s CEO had announced that the corporation would apply GDPR “in spirit” across the globe. In practice, however, the company was making changes to ensure that the GDPR would not circumscribe the majority of its operations.’  

Prediction and democracy 

And the story has moved on. Companies can now promise ‘personalisation’ of their services. There may be benefits to customers but it also means they are able to glean more data from the user as you have to tell them more. A ‘personal assistant’ device will be involved in observing its owner in order to ‘predict’ what it needs to do to help. Devices which work on voice recognition often include some kind of surveillance and provide an incredible amount of data concerning the person. 

The detail which is becoming possible as the technology advances is breath-taking. Artificial intelligence can pick up on behaviours which elude the conscious mind. ‘The machines capture the nanosecond of disgust that precedes a rapid-fire sequence of anger, comprehension, and finally joy on the face of a young woman watching a few frames of film, when all she can think to say is “I liked it!”’. Zuboff reports on a company which boasts of its algorithm process of facial expressions where ‘Emotions are detected, aggregated, and reported online in real time, second by second…enabling our clients (advertisers, political parties etc.) to make better business decisions.’
Of course, using such things to predict how a person will react easily slides over into modifying and even controlling behaviour as the relevant stimuli are placed on the screen before them. With a General Election due in this country, the book raises fears for the future of democracy along the lines of the allegations concerning Cambridge Analytica’s use of Facebook data, and possible Russian interference, in recent elections. 

A theological twist

But the implications surely go further. There is a way of thinking which proposes a solution to the theological conundrum of the relationship between the absolute sovereignty of God and the simultaneous reality of human choice and responsibility, which seems rather too reminiscent of all this. The idea is something like this: God’s sovereignty enables him to put into position various choices before us as individuals. But at the same time his omniscience knows how we will react and what we will freely choose. Thus, while our choices are indeed our own, God is nevertheless fully in control. 

If this understanding is correct, it occurs to me that for unthinking users of high-powered digital devices which scan a user’s behaviour, the provider is coming very close to having a control over a human being parallel to that of God. What indeed then of the future of mankind? A humanity locked into such a scenario is not only uncannily like the 1999 science – fiction film The Matrix but it also would reduce the world’s population into the two categories of ‘the owners’ and ‘the owned’. I may be running ahead of myself but is this the end-time Babylon of the final chapters of Revelation? 

We cannot be Luddites. The digital revolution is here to stay and there is no putting the clock back. We need to learn to live with it and make the best of its huge potential. But Zuboff’s book does alert us to the dangers and warns us not to be too easily swept along by the ‘freedoms’ of online reality.