Google pioneered a new economic logic comparable to Ford’s mass production

Evidence

Google is to surveillance capitalism what the Ford Motor Company and General Motors were to mass-production–based managerial capitalism. New economic logics and their commercial models are discovered by people in a time and place and then perfected through trial and error. In our time Google became the pioneer, discoverer, elaborator, experimenter, lead practitioner, role model, and diffusion hub of surveillance capitalism. GM and Ford’s iconic status as pioneers of twentieth-century capitalism made them enduring objects of scholarly research and public fascination because the lessons they had to teach resonated far beyond the individual companies. Google’s practices deserve the same kind of examination, not merely as a critique of a single company but rather as the starting point for the codification of a powerful new form of capitalism. — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 197

Categorization

• DEFINE: Frames Google’s role as the site where surveillance capitalism’s logic is being discovered and codified — establishes how to read the company as an economic specimen rather than an isolated firm.
• XREF: connects to: Google pioneered surveillance capitalism as GM pioneered managerial capitalism — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 39; Falling manufacturing profits drove capitalism toward data extraction via platform monopolies — Nick Srnicek, Platform Capitalism, 17

Broader Connections

• Google pioneered surveillance capitalism as GM pioneered managerial capitalism #corroborates (0.95) — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 39
• Falling manufacturing profits drove capitalism toward data extraction via platform monopolies #qualifies (0.80) — Nick Srnicek, Platform Capitalism, 17