Then one day, Strangefolk arrived in the town

They came in camouflage, hidden behind dark glasses

But no one noticed them, they only saw shadows

You see, without the Truth to the Eyes, the Happyfolk were blind

Gorillaz feat. Dennis Hopper, Fire Coming Out of the Monkey’s Head

As we saw in the previous item, the application of telemetry to the human home was originally envisioned as a closed loop that would only benefit its inhabitants. The Aware Home project took for granted that the information collected by the devices and their respective rights would belong “exclusively to the people living in the house.” However, this project did not count on the fact that Google—by then a promising startup—was about to find an unusual source of revenue that would give rise to a whole new accumulation logic. 

This feedback loop, called behavioral value reinvestment cycle by Zuboff, works as follows: 1. the user enters information into Search; 2. this information, along with that from the data exhaust, is converted into behavioral data; 3. the data is analyzed; 4. this information is then used to improve the company’s services, after which it goes back to step number 1, the user. This closed cycle did not produce surplus value until Google, under pressure from its investors to generate profits in the midst of the “dot-com bubble,” had an idea: “The raw materials that had been solely user to improve the quality of search results would now also be put to use in the service of targeting advertising to individual users.”² Until then, Google had refused to impose advertising on Search users. However, the inclusion of a third actor in the value cycle, the advertiser, revealed a complex dynamic in which it was not clear whether the users were the company’s customers, although there was no economic transaction, or whether they were the product that was sold in the form of data to advertisers, who would be the company’s real customers.

Este bucle de retroalimentación, llamado ciclo de reinversión del valor conductual por Zuboff, funciona del siguiente modo: 1. el usuario introduce información en el motor de búsqueda; 2. esta información, junto con aquella proveniente del exosto de datos, es convertida en datos conductuales; 3. los datos son analizados; 4. esta información es utilizada para mejorar los servicios de la compañía, luego de lo cual se vuelve al número paso número 1, el usuario. Este ciclo cerrado no produjo plusvalía hasta que Google, presionado por sus inversionistas para generar ganancias en medio de la “burbuja puntocom”, tuvo una idea: «las materias primas que hasta entonces, se habían utilizado para mejorar la calidad de los resultados de las búsquedas iban a ser usadas también para seleccionar y “dirigir” publicidad hacia los usuarios individuales»². Hasta entonces Google se había negado a imponerle publicidad a los usuarios de su motor de búsqueda. Sin embargo, la inclusión de un tercer actor en el ciclo de valorización, el anunciante, reveló una dinámica compleja en la que no se podía definir con claridad si los usuarios eran los clientes de la compañía, aunque no hubiera una transacción económica, o si eran el producto que era vendido en forma de datos a los anunciantes, que vendrían a ser los verdaderos clientes de la compañía.  

According to Zuboff, neither of these two interpretations is entirely correct: the application of the behavioral value cycle to Google’s advertising division turned the search engine users into the raw material of the company’s monetization.

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1. Zuboff, Surveillance Capitalism, 68. ↩︎
2. Ibid., 118. ↩︎