I think its importance lies in the fact that this knowledge allows us to decide. And decision-making is something that we are largely deprived of in a world that drives us to choose based on impulses and emotions. What is the difference between one thing and the other? Why, if I make decisions about how to feed myself, what kind of food to buy, or where, based on prices, affinity with the store, or what we consider healthy for me or my family, is it so difficult to apply the same criteria to other things, such as the devices or apps I use? How do we figure out which foods and their combinations are good, and how should we go about evaluating the same for the everyday apps that ultimately impact my mind and body? This is the proposal: to reflect and explore together how things work, so that later, each person can decide. We are going to start with something that surrounds us and is part of our everyday life.
Google.
Google belongs to a conglomerate of companies called Alphabet, and almost 90 percent of the revenue for this conglomerate comes from Google. To give us an idea, the combined profits of these companies are equivalent to the GDPs of some countries… but with much fewer people involved, approximately 100,000. Google is not just the search engine, the browser, where I store my photos, the email I use to connect to other things, the operating system of my phone, my tablet, YouTube and the videos I watch, or the lives I want to live, the repository of my personal photos and videos, shared files and documents. All the contacts on my phone. The places I visit, the people I see, the time I spend in each place. What my child studies, how they study, and how well they are doing. Their age, what we like, what we don’t, the shows they watch. What we buy, what we want to buy, how much money we spend, how much I roughly earn. What my car is, the politician or policy I like, the party I dislike. My favorite football team, what I did 20 years ago, when I got drunk, what I thought 15 years ago, and what I think now.
A lot, isn’t it?
To start unraveling this, it is important to know that, initially, Google is not what it portrays. This is one of those companies that, as we mentioned, concentrates wealth like small countries. And make no mistake, it’s not that I don’t use their products. It’s that I prefer an honest relationship with them. It becomes difficult to think about how they will carry out their slogan “Don’t be evil” within the business model that sustains them. The narrative of the lone inventor in a garage is beautiful, but it is dishonest to let us assume that this is the company we face today.
Perhaps they started that way, but at some point in their growth, they had to decide between growing or perishing, and growth has a cost. These companies grew based on investments. That means companies, the state, and individuals lent them money in exchange for sharing the profits. Therefore, the company’s direction is no longer free from pressure because the money invested must yield returns. Thus, objectives change, and the market logic, that is, to produce profit, guides the course.
And what did Google sell most to generate such high profit margins? Advertising. Google understood early on that the internet is a medium of communication, and in those media, it is advertising that sustains them. At this point, I want to pause and read what Esteban Magnani tells us in “The Comfort Cage.”
By selling advertising, Google survived the dot-com crisis. Now then, advertising—how does that work? How do you make money selling ads? Well, it’s because the medium and how to reach consumers changed radically. What would happen if we knew what each person wanted and needed? If we could offer each individual just what they were looking for or desiring. If we could provide a service through which the butcher’s ad reaches the person who wants to have a barbecue.
Well, this is what it’s about but on a global scale. That’s how it grew, by knowing and segmenting more and more effectively to whom each ad should be shown. A simple idea, but one that, at the same time, forever changed how we inhabit the world. This is just a thread of a tangled web with many loose ends.