Building the Surveillance Network
The question that immediately faces the creator a new world is: “How should this new world look?” The creators of cyberspace held they could create a world without governments and without social classes. This equitable paradise would not need rules because people are “naturally good.”
The first dose of reality to invade the online commune was the Morris Worm. Meant to convince people its creator, Robert Tappan Morris, worked at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology instead of Cornell, the Worm combined vulnerabilities in two applications, and the high trust level of Internet operators at the time, to spread. Because of coding mistakes, the Worm crashed systems rather than spreading harmlessly.
The Worm was the first time this new online community had been attacked in a meaningful way—suddenly the entire field of cybersecurity was born.
The second bit of reality to impose itself on this new cyber world was money.
The Culture of Social Media
The engineers and scientists designing digital computer networks saw, early on, they were creating a new thing—a cyber world or cyberspace. This world was a space where humans could build anew, without the influences of existing governments and the physical world. What should culture should this new world adopt? The strong communal and libertarian culture of Silicon Valley, the culture of The Whole Earth Catalog, provided the answer.
In 1996, John Perry Barlow of the Electronic Frontier Foundation declared:
Governments of the Industrial World, you weary giants of flesh and steel, I come from Cyberspace, the new home of Mind. On behalf of the future, I ask you of the past to leave us alone. You are not welcome among us. You have no sovereignty where we gather.
We have no elected government, nor are we likely to have one, so I address you with no greater authority than that with which liberty itself always speaks. I declare the global social space we are building to be naturally independent of the tyrannies you seek to impose on us. You have no moral right to rule us nor do you possess any methods of enforcement we have true reason to fear.
. . . .
Your legal concepts of property, expression, identity, movement, and context do not apply to us. They are all based on matter, and there is no matter here.
Our identities have no bodies, so, unlike you, we cannot obtain order by physical coercion. We believe that from ethics, enlightened self-interest, and the commonweal, our governance will emerge.[1]
Richard Barbrook and Andy Cameron, in an early and influential article, call this culture the Californian Ideology, and say it is “naturalising and giving a technological proof to a libertarian political philosophy,” through a “mix of cybernetics, free market economics, and counter-culture libertarianism.”[2]
These cyber creators were going to create a world without fences, without status, without governance, and without coercion. They believed that because people are naturally good, this creation would represent a new start for mankind.
Turner says these networks transferred to cyberspace, which became “the digital equivalent of the western landscape into which so many communards set forth in the late 1960s, the ‘electronic frontier.’”[3] Social graphs map out these real-world networks, which are then monetized by Google, Facebook, and others in a bid to build successful companies (as described previously).
These followers of the Californian Ideology believed this new world of bits would eventually influence or control the old world of atoms, remaking it into the paradise progressives had always sought.
Commercializing Search
In 1998, Google was a small company providing an essentially free service to the Internet. The company’s servers indexed all known web pages and used a new and novel Page Rank algorithm to help users find relevant content. The company cached information about individual users, such as search terms and the links they followed, but the company did not do much with this information.
Amit Patel, a Stanford graduate with a special interest in data mining, realized the information in these logs could be used to gain a sense of human behavior—they called this digital exhaust. The company soon realized this information could be used to build the system Larry Page, one of Google’s founders, originally envisioned—a computer that could tell users what they should do rather than just answering questions.
The company began working on ways to achieve this dream, scooping up a $25 million cash infusion from two widely respected Silicon Valley investment firms. Advertising was not something Google was interested in at this time. Other search engines collected revenue from the sites they indexed or by selling placement in their search results. Google eschewed all of these forms of revenue and focused on selling access to private versions of their search engine and other products.
The Silicon Valley bust starting in April 2000 changed Google’s focus. Investors were pushing the company to make money or shut down. Google’s leadership decided to use the information they already had to serve behavioral advertising.
Behavioral advertising is effective—so effective it outstrips traditional advertising’s efficiency. Over time, even television and in-store advertising has become behavioral. Why is behavioral advertising so effective? Because of the nudge.
[1] John Perry Barlow, “A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace,” Electronic Frontier Foundation, February 1996, https://www.eff.org/cyberspace-independence.
[2] Barbrook and Cameron, “The Californian Ideology.”
[3] Turner, Counterculture to Cyberculture, loc 110.