The Age of Surveillance Capitalism

Behavioral surplus defines Google’s earnings success. In 2016, 89 percent of the revenues of its parent company, Alphabet, derived from Google’s targeted advertising programs. The scale of raw-material flows is reflected in Google’s domination of the internet, processing over 40,000 search queries every second on average: more than 3.5 billion searches per day and 1.2 trillion searches per year worldwide in 2017. Instrumentarian power cultivates an unusual “way of knowing” that combines the “formal indifference” of the neoliberal worldview with the observational perspective of radical behaviorism. Instrumentarianism and Big Other signal the transformation of the market into a project of total certainty, an undertaking that is unimaginable outside the digital milieu, but also unimaginable outside the logic of accumulation that is surveillance capitalism. In the US, local law enforcement has joined the queue of institutions seeking access to instrumentarian power.