Google and Surveillance Capitalism: Inside the Ouroboros

The idea behind surveillance capitalism is simple: 1. collect as much data as possible. 2. fashion behavioral predictions from said data, tied to user profiles, 3. sell the predictions as a product to interested parties (advertisers; governments; whomever's buying.) To extract this data, Google has developed an elaborate system to track who you message, what you buy, and where you go.

Every click is accounted for.

It started with Search: Google logs every search you make, and every URL you visit across its platforms. No log in, no problem: Google can track you by your IP address and its slew of cookies. On top of that, there's Google Analytics, the largest cross-site tracker on the internet. Google's embedded trackers collect data on every page visit, the length of time, and what you click. (Not even incognito mode is... incognito.)

Next came Google suite—Docs, Gmail, etc—a veritable goldmine of metadata (or "data about data"). Meanwhile, Gmail tracks the sender of every email and its receiver, timestamps, and so on.

As surveillance capitalism has expanded over the years, so has the scope of data Google collects. Biometric data (face, voice), location, private medical data, search terms—if it can be used to identify you, to sell to you, it creates value for Google.

It may not seem like it, but a single image can transmit loads of sell-able data: from the activities you enjoy, to your interests; "mood, gaze, clothing, gait, hair, body type, and posture"—Google can use all of this to beef up their behavioral predictions. (Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 252).

A photo of your cat, a group shot from Friendsgiving, the tabs you open while researching a character’s illness or a historical execution method; everything is a potential reservoir of data that advertisers would very much like to own.

But it doesn't stop there.

There's also a new type of data on the rise—so-called "emotional analytics"—that collects emotional states down to the micro-level. It isn’t just what you click, but how you feel while you’re doing it. A lingering gaze (whomst among us hasn’t gazed into the void of late); a furrowing of the brow; where your cursor or eye travels on the screen… Advertisers track your real-time emotional state so the algorithm can time ads for when you are most easily influenced (or vulnerable).

Which is kind of a nightmare for anyone whose work involves introspection.

Writing is slow and vulnerable. Writing requires sitting with discomfort, ambiguity, obsessions... unpublishable thoughts, all the fun stuff. And on platforms like Google Docs, that process happens inside systems explicitly designed to observe, categorize, and monetize behavior.

Three years ago, a growing sense of fatigue/horror at Big Tech's general authoritarian lurch—and the need to carve out a space, however small, where human work could exist without being harvested—prompted us to build something better than Google Docs (... yeah, we're getting there.) Our need has only grown stronger—as has the Ellipsus community that's grown up around it.

We could have never predicted how bad it would get out there, or how fast. But we’re incredibly optimistic that an effort to move away from Big Tech into human-first, privacy-focused creative spaces will play a huge part in impeding the tide toward surveillance and authoritarianism online.

(... Anyway, they might have the algos: we've got actual people. 🔥)

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