In time, the Strangefolk found their way into the higher reaches of the mountain
And it was there that they found the caves of unimaginable sincerity and beauty
By chance, they stumbled upon the place where all good souls come to rest
Gorillaz feat. Dennis Hopper, Fire Coming Out of the Monkey’s Head
The situation that turns Google’s users into the raw material of its valorization cycle begins with a state of exception (0.9, 0.10, 7.25, 7.26, 8.7). In the words of Shoshana Zuboff:
The declaration of a state of exception function in politics as cover for the suspension of the rule of law and the introduction of new executive powers justified by crisis. At Google in late 2000, it became a rationale for annulling the reciprocal that existed between Google and its users, steeling the founders to abandon their passionate and public opposition to advertising.1
By suspending the reciprocity between that determined that user data would be used only to make service improvements to the company’s products (a “legitimate state” in any business model), Google tacitly declared a state of exception and claimed sovereignty over this information. The data collected by the Search servers began to be seen not as a method for providing better service but as a source of revenue that could be capitalized and turned into surplus value.
Zuboff associates this circumstance with one of the basic principles of colonial policy and imperialism (8.4, 8.20), Marx’s idea of the “original sin of simple robbery,”
which centuries ago had made possible the ‘original accumulation of capital’ (Marx) and had started all further accumulation, had eventually to be repeated lest the motor of accumulation suddenly die down.2
Google’s declaration of sovereignty over the trail of information that its users leave behind when using its search engine initiates a cycle of dispossession in which we are robbed of private information about our lives, tastes, desires and aspirations, which becomes the property of a corporation and is brazenly used to generate profits. This invasion and theft of our private lives is the continuation by cybernetic means of the media’s incursion into the human domus (9.9, 9.15), which now penetrates into our inner life and social existence, into our very experience of the world. Surveillance capitalism initiates a phase of media evolution subsequent to the Ballardian invasion of the human mind (5.12, 9.2, 9.4), in which the economy and the media have not only penetrated the psyche but begin to extract information from it in the form of data.
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