Google ’ s revenue does not come from the direct provision of retail Cloud services, such as search, but from the monetization of User attention paid to services in the course of engagement. Its Cloud model economics is based on the successful transformation of the web into a massive peer-to-peer advertising platform, and the transformation of advertising into a meshwork of computationally microtargeted points and clicks. By the pairing of supplied and demanded attention at the infinitesimal degrees of individual search results, page views, and keyword bidding, Google absorbs cognitive capital from the collective intellect of its User population, siphoning value centripetally and then pushing it back outward. <sup>67</sup> Google ’ s vast suite of Cloud services costs no money for Users to use, but they are not exactly free; the company generates far more money in aggregate by optimizing attention and information that it costs them to provide those services, and in this regard Google ’ s business is exemplary of platform surplus value discussed in the second chapter, and of how the platform derives value proportional to its own use and adoption. Google ’ s essential techniques for this, besides the built-in network effect of its vast User population, are the proprietary algorithms that precisely pair bid-on search terms with optimized advertising and results. Every time anyone makes a search on Google and clicks on a particular result or advertisement, she is also retraining the platform ’ s algorithmic intelligence, a tiny bit each time, helping it to make incrementally more precise predictions of User intention, intuition, desire, and demand. Without minimizing the expertise of Google ’ s scientists and engineers to actually compose these complex systems, we can also say that Google ’ s search and advertising infrastructure draws on the work of its users to optimize which search results will best match the inquiries made by future Users and their interests. Every time we execute a search query, Google is not only working for us; we are also working for Google. The total value of Google ’ s costs to provide those services is always less than the total value of the intellectual and information capital that its User population provides to the platform. The difference between the former and the latter was a gross profit margin of 62.86% for 2015 as of mid-June, according to Google ’ s reporting. Whereas for all advertising economies, the audience is the real product resold by the minute, impression, or click, for mature platform economies such as Google ’ s, the User is the product and the worker cobuilding the platform (of which he or she or it is also a customer). This would not work if Users themselves did not receive real platform value from their participation in this particular platform as opposed to others. From the perspective of the individual User, the personal value of information received must be (or at least seem) greater than value sent, even if at the aggregate level of User populations, the inverse may be true. At once, Google ’ s Cloud economics draws on capitalized cognition, networked value production, and incremental value accumulation and reappropriation. <sup>68</sup> In this sense, it is not foremost an apparatus of surveillance or control per se but a medium for the capture and transformation of living, thinking, and knowing into platform value. The latter is not reducible to the former. Its “ organization of the world ’ s information ” strongly depends on the incorporation of the work done for its global index by its Users, and the blending of that work into new aggregates, so as to better train that machine ’ s capacity to simulate, motivate, and mediate Cloud economies with thought-by-thought, gesture-by-gesture granularity. One wonders what the Soviet cyberneticians of the 1950s and 1960s, with their plodding ledgers and “ gosplans, ” would make of such a system if it were stripped of its patina of American hegemony.
Cloud Layer
137