Google’s secrecy means its chief economist’s writings reveal its logic

Evidence

Google is a notoriously secretive company, and one is hard-pressed to imagine a Drucker equivalent freely roaming the scene and scribbling in the hallways. Its executives carefully craft their messages of digital evangelism in books and blog posts, but its operations are not easily accessible to outside researchers or journalists. In 2016 a lawsuit brought against the company by a product manager alleged an internal spying program in which employees are expected to identify coworkers who violate the firm’s confidentiality agreement: a broad prohibition against divulging anything about the company to anyone. The closest thing we have to a Buck Weaver or James Couzens codifying Google’s practices and objectives is the company’s longtime chief economist, Hal Varian, who aids the cause of understanding with scholarly articles that explore important themes. Varian has been described as “the Adam Smith of the discipline of Googlenomics” and the “godfather” of its advertising model. It is in Varian’s work that we find hidden-in-plain-sight important clues to the logic of surveillance capitalism and its claims to power. — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 199

Categorization

• XREF: Varian’s economics articles as primary-source window into Google parallels the Milgrom law-merchant essay’s method of reading commercial institutions’ own records — both are primary-source textual excavation. — connects to: Google’s scapegoating of a single engineer contradicted known internal evidence — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 457