Matteo Pasquinelli’s presentation this morning at the Society of the Query was based on his paper, Google’s PageRank Algorithm: A Diagram of Cognitive Capitalism and the Rentier of the Common Intellect. The paper can be downloaded from his website.

The essay and presentation of the Italian media theorist and critic focused on an alternative direction for research in the field of critical Internet/ Google studies. He proposed a shift of focus from Google’s power and monopoly and the associated critique in Foucauldian fashion developed within fields such as surveillance studies, to the “political economy of the PageRank algorithm.” According to Pasquinelli, the PageRank algorithm is the base of Google’s power and an emblematic and effective diagram for cognitive capitalism.

Google’s PageRank algorithm determines the value of a website according to the number of inlinks received by a webpage. The algorithm was inspired by the academic publications’ citation system, in which the value of an academic publication is determined by the number of quotations received by the journal’s articles. Pasquinelli takes this algorithm as a starting point in order to introduce into critical studies the notion of “network surplus-value,” a notion inspired by Guatarri’s notion of “machinic surplus value.”

The Google PageRank diagram is the most effective diagram of the cognitive economy because it makes visible precisely this aspect characteristic of the cognitive economy, namely network value. Network value adds up to the more established notions of commodity use value and exchange value. Network value refers to the circulation value of a commodity. The pollination metaphor used by the first speaker, Yann Moulier Boutang, is useful in understanding network value. Each one of us as “click workers” contributes to the production and accumulation of network value, which is further being embedded in lucrative activities, such as Google’s advertising model. While in the knowledge economy a particular emphasis is placed on intellectual property, the notion of cognitive rent to which Matteo Pasquinelli draws attention becomes useful here. Google as “rentier of the common intellect” refers to the way in which free content produced with the free labour of individuals browsing the internet is being indexed by Google and used in profit generating activities.  From this perspective Pasquinelli challenges Lessing’s notion of “free culture” in that Google offers a platform and certain services for free, but each one of us contributes to the Google business when performing a search, data which is being fed into the page ranking algorithm. The use of the notion of common intellect or collective intelligence in this context is however debatable, as shown in the discussion session which followed the presentation, because there is only a certain relatively limited segment of individuals – the users which contribute content to the web – , whose linking activity is being fed into the PageRank algorithm. The prominence of the PageRank algorithm as generator of network value has also been questioned, as the algorithm is not the only ranking instrument. As the posting on Henk van Ess’ website shows, human evaluators also participate in page ranking.

What is there to be done about Google’s accumulation of value by means of exploitation of the common intellect? Or to use Pasquinelli’s metaphor, are there alternatives to Google’s parasitizing of the collective production of knowledge? How can this value be re-appropriated? As the speaker suggested, perhaps through voluntary hand made indexing of the web? Or an open page rank algorithm? Or perhaps a trust rank? This question is still open.

“In a society of the query, it’s an interesting question to ask what happens to all those queries, what legal norms apply to the registration, processing and access to these queries, and do these norms successfully safeguard the more fundamental interests of search engine users: a free realm to seek and access information and ideas,” began Joris van Hoboken at The Society of The Query conference this afternoon.

Hoboken is a PhD candidate at the Institute for Information Law at the University of Amsterdam, writing his dissertation about search engines and freedom of expression. His research investigates the impact of legal norms on the users’ freedom, and today at The Society of the Query he focused on the question, “Does privacy still exist in an environment of search.”

Accessing Our Data From Search Engines
Hoboken rightfully admitted that most users have a lack of knowledge about data protection. Corporations behind popular search engines like Google, Yahoo and AOL are storing a plethora of user data (query logs, IP, time, cookies etc), and what most people don’t know is that EU law grants users “the right to access any personal data stored about them.”

For example, Article 12 (European Union Directive 95/46/EC) reads, “Member States shall guarantee every data subject the right to obtain from the controller: [...] knowledge of the logic involved in any automatic processing of data concerning him. [...] When applied specifically to search engines, users must have the right to access any personal data stored about them.” Which brings Hoboken to the question: why are we so passive in enforcing these rights?

Exercising Our Rights To Our Data
In 2006 AOL purposefully released 20 million partially anonymized search queries. Hoboken reminded us of how seemingly innocuous data can be pieced together and traced back to our identifies, as was the case with AOL user #4417749 who, based on the content of her web queries, was later identified as 62-year old widow Thelma Arnold. Online you exist as a number, but data is never completely anonymized. Hoboken laments, “AOL thought it would be good for researchers, and it’s a bit unfortunate that the backlash from this experiment means that it is now much harder for the public to get a hold of search data. Search data that is important for scholars to do do research.”

Although there are opportunities for accessing this information, the application of law sometimes falls short. Hoboken lists three problems that we run into when attempting to access our data from search engines, “These companies are opaque, divorced from reality, and they advocate data storage with reference to repressive purposes.” In his presentation he points to examples of these problems echoed in  Google’s retention policy and in an NPR with Google co-founder Eric Schmidt (see slides * coming soon).

“We really have to worry about the extended amount of data being stored,” says Hoboken, “but fortunately there are many laws already established to protect us and our data.” He challenges us to take advantage of these laws and to ask more questions. And while it may not be possible to anatomize the data being collected, the fate of online privacy lies in our understanding of these laws and in our ability to exercise the rights that will protect our data from being (ab)used.

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Swiss historian of technology David Gugerli talked about the culture of the serach society during his speech at the Society of the Query. Gugerli emphasizes how searching has become a crucial part in every part of society. The author of “Search Engines. The World as a database” (review here) exemplifies this by mentioning the U.S. TV Show CSI, where a team of forensic investigators tries to clarify homocide cases. For Gugerli a dead body in a CSI show represents a database full of traces. The investigators search for the different traces and recombine them in order to solve the criminal case. The whole process of searching becomes the main part of the CSI story, CSI depicts the world as a database.

Using this example David Gugerli leads the hearer to his observation that data management systems have become a crucial variable shaping our real social world. The usage of database management systems has become an instrument to produce and to influence social change, by those managing databases and by those using it. To understand the major significance of database management systems it is important to be aware of the history of databases which has produced the enormous flexibility of modern database systems.

The idea of databases serving as a pool full of endless information emerged in the 1960s because of the society becoming more complex and therefore producing more complex data. Databases at this time were only able to answer foreseen questions, they were build for the purpose of providing answers for certain questions. But the emerging idea was that databases should be able to give answers to unexpected questions and to recombine information.

Gugerli describes the theoretical work which emerged during the 1970s and enabled the development of databases able to provide answers to new questions. The main question people dealt with was how to separate the process of retrieving information from the process of storing information. Until this idea came up the programmers creating and feeding the databases were also the only people being able to use them and extract information of them.

Mathematician and database theorist Edgar F. „Ted“ Codd produced basic work for the development of the relational data base. His goal was to split the knowledge about how to use a data base from the knowledge about how a database is structured. To do this Codd contributed to the development of a search and query language (SEQUEL = Structured English Query Language). This language build the basis for the aim to enable access to databases to people not having knowledge about the architecture of the database and in this way took the power from the programmer.

Gugerli links this shift in database theory, which enabled a new way of asking and interpreting with ideas of critical french authors like Barthes, Derrida, Foucault. They stated that the interpretation of a text cannot be determined by the author beforehand, there is an interpretative flexibility. In Gugerli‘s point of view this flexibility also entered the database sciences. As a result of this shift there also emerge consequences for social reality: new organizational strucutres, new administration forms, new forms of allocation. Gugerli sees an example for these consequences in the modern 20th century enterprise using highly complex logistics, supply chain management and real time production for example. These forms are supported or even determined by database management systems.

Are we all just worker bees being exploited by Google for capitalistic means?

Google has become the emblem of cognitive capitalism because it has invented a new economic model relying on the controlled development of collective intelligence networks. French socio-economist Yann Moulier Boutang explored the dependency of Google (as a factory for the commodization of knowledge) on human querying (as labor).

“You are working for Google! Every second, 15 million people are clicking and feeding data to Google – a true paradigm of people working for the firm,” explains Boutang. What Google is selling is not an ordinary service, but a meta-service, one that depends on human contribution. He likens this human activity to that of the worker bee, and the economy of Google is dependent on the pollination of these bees. Boutang further illustrates the analogy by looking at the habits of beekeepers, “Beekeepers in the U.S. are no longer making their living by selling wax or honey. They are selling the bee’s activity: they rent their service of pollination.”

Boutang surmises that Google’s new economic model may be reshaping capitalism into -  what he refers to as – a “meta-market”. In this type of market knowledge is recognized as a public, non-rival good that can be easily transferred through the network. The marketable asset here goes beyond cognitive capitalism (where the pure input/output of an immaterial asset is commodified) by establishing a new market based on the meta-data culled form  “human pollination”.

In conclusion Boutang asks, “Is it possible to free the clickworker from Google?” Boutang seems uncertain, but ultimately he believes that “an imitation Google”, an open-source or publicly owned knowledge engine,  would be the last hope for freeing the bees from the beekeeper.

Geert Lovink just welcomed all the visitors and described how the conference came into being after his essay on Society of the Query and the Googlization of Our Lives.

Bloggers Chris Castiglione, Liliana Bounegru, Dennis Deicke, Morgan Currie, Rosa Menkman and Tjerk Timan will be covering the Society of the Query Conference on this blog. Stay tuned for their conference reports.

Photography by Anne Helmond. All photos from the Society of the Query Conference on Flickr.