Digital Anthropology

A pre-modern absolutismFinally - and this is key - the new concentration of privacy rights is institutionalized in the automatic undetectable functions of a global infrastructure that most of the world’s people also happen to think is essential for basic social participation. This turns ordinary life into the daily renewal of a 21st century Faustian pact.

What is Google up to next?  We know it’s secret, but here is how it looks to me. Google is no longer content with the data business.  It’s next step is to build an even more radical „reality business.”  Google sees „reality” as the next big thing that it can carve up and sell. In the data business, the payoff is in data patterns that help target ads. In the reality business, the payoff is in shaping and communicating real life behaviors of people and things in millions of ways that drive revenue to Google. The business model is expanding to encompass the digital you as well as the actual you. The scene is changing from virtual reality to, well, reality. Unsurprisingly, the two entities at the vanguard of this new wave are Google and the NSA.

In a 2011 paper,  MIT Professor Alex Pentland explains the value of reality mining. „We must reinvent societies’ systems within a control framework.” He notes that this will require „exponential growth in data about human behavior.”

the proliferation of sensors, mobile phones, and other data capture devices will provide the „eyes and ears” of a „world-spanning living organism.”

“pattern of life analysis”

All this suggests that Google is building capabilities even more ambitious than reality „mining”. The aim is not merely the God’s eye view, but the God’s eye power to shape and control reality.

There are two useful ideas for us in the work of historian Karl Polanyi. He described the rise of a new human conception: the self-regulating market economy.  He saw that the market economies of the 19th and 20th centuries depended upon three astonishing mental inventions.  He called them „fictions“. The first was that human life can be subordinated to market dynamics and be reborn as „labor.” Second,  nature can be subordinated and reborn as „real estate.” Third, that purchasing power can be reborn as „money.”  The very possibility of industrial capitalism depended upon the creation of  these  three critical  „fictional commodities.” Life, nature, and exchange had to be turned into things that could be profitably bought and sold.

Google brings us to the precipice of a new development in the scope of the market economy. A fourth fictional commodity is emerging as a dominant characteristic of market dynamics in the 21st century. „Reality” is about to undergo the same kind of fictional transformation and be reborn as „behavior.” 

Polanyi understood that the pure unimpeded operations of  a self-regulating of the market were profoundly destructive. Society required    countermeasures to avoid such danger. He called this the „double movement”:  „a network of measures and policies...integrated into powerful institutions designed to check the action of the market relative to labor, land, and money.”

We are beyond the realm of economics here. This is not merely a conversation about free  markets; it’s a conversation about free people.

But such specialized  professional arguments shift the Google debate from the realm of everyday life and ordinary people to the arcane interests of economists and bureaucrats. They obscure the fact that the issues have shifted from monopolies of products or services to monopolies of rights: rights to privacy and rights to reality.  These new forms of power, poorly understood except by their own practitioners, threaten the sovereignty of the democratic social contract.