1998 – What Do You Want?

I only heard Pink Floyd performing live once in my life.  Well, to be honest, I was never the kind of person who went to rock concerts, but Pink Floyd were on stage in the middle of 1968 at King’s College (one of the acts in that year’s May Ball).  When I was talking about that rather amazing event to a friend, he reminded me their lead vocalist was Syd Barrett.  That wasn’t the way I remembered the night, and so I went of searching online.  As it turned out, my poor memory had got that right:  Roger Waters had already taken over as the lead singer by then, and a drugs-addled Syd Barrett had just about disappeared from the line-up, although he remained to write some of their lyrics and music for a little longer.

At this stage in their career, Pink Floyd were developing songs that would eventually go into ‘Ummagumma’, as well as presenting others from their recently released album ‘A Saucerful of Secrets’.  In his ecstatic (drunk!) state in the first set at 1.50 pm, at the culmination of ‘Set the Controls for the Heart of the Sun’ (an extended version that must have run for at least ten minutes) Roger Waters leapt into the crowd in front of him.  It wasn’t a mosh pit.  Always polite, the assembled Kingsmen and partners moved aside, and let him fall on the ground:  by this means, he beat David Bowie’s ‘The Man Who Fell to Earth’ by eight years (the film that was claimed to have defined David Bowie, who went through filming on 8mgs of cocaine a day, or so he said!).  Roger Waters survived the consideration of the audience and managed to get through a second performance at 4 am without any more gymnastics.

To get the details of this story straight, I had to supplement my recollections by going to a series of Wikipedia articles, via Safari.  If I’d been asked what I had done, I would have said “I googled it.”  Like many people, I rely on sources like Wikipedia to help me:  both to bolster a less than perfect memory, but also to enjoy all the tempting footnotes that a Wikipedia entry offers.  Searching can take up hours of fun chasing enjoyable red herrings!  A query about Pink Floyd led me on to choral singing, Handel operas, The Who, and so much more.  What a lovely, indulgent and fun way to spend the day.

The gateway into this treasure trove of data began with two research students at Stanford University, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, who became interested in the development of search engines.  The first few attempts to help users navigate the web were really simple indexes, systems like the early version of Yahoo, which would list websites by name assessing the key words you had put into your search.  When you used a browser like Yahoo, it would offer websites ranked by the frequency with which the terms you were seeking appeared.  Page and Brin thought a better system would be more complex, assessing a website’s relevance to your search by both the the number of pages, and the links between those pages and the original site you were checking.  This technique they named Page Rank, and they first called their search software BackRub because it checked backlinks to estimate the importance of a site.

Working with a growing team, they changed the name to Google.  Why Google?  I imagine it was chosen as a play on the word ‘googol’, the scientific name for the number 1 followed by 100 zeros (a very big number!).  Perhaps a little ambitious at the time, they wanted their choice to suggest the search engine would provide vast amounts of information, though I doubt they had imagined how enormous that accessible data treasure trove would become.  Google was registered in 1997, and the company was incorporated on September 4, 1998.

The timing was fortuitous.  This was when the ‘dot-com boom’ was, well, booming!  In August they obtained their first investment, $US100,000 from Andy Bechtolsheim, one of the founders of Sun Microsystems.  Later in the year they received money from three other angel investors, Jeff Bezos, Professor David Cheriton at Stanford, and an entrepreneur, Ram Shriram.  By the end of the year, with additional amounts from that other famous group of friends, family and fools, (OK, you can forget the ‘fools’ category), they had raised around $US1m, enough to enable to set up in Menlo Park, a Californian suburb adjacent to Stanford.   Within a year, a full funding round increased their investments to over $US25m.  Now the big venture capital firms were coming on board, in their case both Kleiner Perkins and Sequoia Capital.  These were major players, with Kleiner Perkins to raise some $9bn as one of the largest firms in Silicon Valley, investing in Amazon, Twitter and many others; Sequoia is around one-third the size of Kleiner Perkins, but their stellar list of early-stage investments includes Apple, YouTube, Instagram, Zoom, WhatsApp, LinkedIn and PayPal.  Those were the days, although investors piled into many other start-ups between 1998 and 2000, only for the ‘dot-com bust’ to see many collapse shortly thereafter.

You know the rest of the story, as Google has grown and grown.  In 2003, the company moved to Mountain View, home of many Silicon Valley firms, establishing their Googleplex headquarters, and just a year later went public.  Their IPO saw just over 19.5m shares offered, for $US85 a share, and established its market capitalisation at $US23bn!  Yes, that name google was a good one.  As another element of their business defined by big numbers, by 2011 Google was handling approximately 3 billion searches per day, and the total of monthly unique visitors to Google surpassed one billion for the first time.  In recent years, Google has regularly been regarded as the second or third most valuable brand in the world, with Apple as #1, and currently Microsoft at #2.  Google is now part of Alphabet, and in 2021, Alphabet joined Apple and Microsoft in hitting a US2tn market capitalisation.  The top two briefly hit $3trn recently!  Google differs from others in that most of its revenue is from advertising, but the purchase of Android in 2005 has meant it’s a key player in mobile phone technology.

Search and Advertising.  In 2022, so much of many peoples’ lives is shaped by internet searching and online advertising.  On top of that, the COVID-19 pandemic has accelerated the degree to which shopping is also dominated by online.  I know many people look back twenty years and regret the investment opportunities they missed: “if only I had bought shares in Microsoft/Apple/Google etc.” (I am not forgetting there were other consequential opportunities missed back then, to do with partners, employment and more, of course!).  As I look back 50 years, however, I have a slightly different perspective on what I missed.

In the early 1970s, I had been researching the emergence of computer programming.  Then my attention wandered:  this willingness to move into new areas was to become a feature of my life from that point onwards!  I became interested in intellectual development, medicine and the social sciences, dreaming, and so many other equally fascinating topics.  However, in 1973, I was on Hampstead Heath, being introduced to the journalist and novelist Michael Frayn.  Since the middle of the 1970s, Michael Frayn has become regarded as one of the UK’s leading playwrights, with serious intellectual dramas like Copenhagen and Democracy, and the hilarious, brilliant Noises Off.  This last, like any comedy, it is hard to explain, but it concerns a British bedroom farce (Noises On!), plays where we see disasters and confusions taking places behind the scenes, as characters in various stages of undress rush on and off the stage.  However, back when I met him, Michael Frayn was better known for his novels.

After  that meeting, I immediately looked for his books, and first read The Tin Men.  It proved to be an extremely funny satire about the goings on at an automation research centre, preparing for a visit by the Queen to open a new wing.  Almost no-one seems to be doing research, and it is a pointed send-up of academics.  However, it did nothing to prepare me for reading the next of his books, A Very Private Life, which had been published five years earlier.  This proved to be a dark, unsettling and eventually depressing futuristic story about a young woman, Uncumber.  Uncumber comes from a privileged family, and like many others with a similar background, lives in virtual isolation, in an enveloping cocoon, all her contacts mediated through technology, her life managed by drugs.  She escapes to meet a man she has only seen virtually, but then rejects him because he wants to use the same drugs she is trying to stop consuming.  The novel ends with her capture.  She’s imprisoned in a room remarkably similar to the one she’d left for her ‘adventure’, unencumbered, living a medicated life where ‘every emotion exists on tap and the most intimate experience is sex which has been replaced by lying next to your lover experiencing entirely private and separate hallucinations’.

I found this novel sad and pessimistic, but, as usual, I missed as much as I absorbed.  Forget about missing out on early investments in IT companies:  here, years before, was a tale about the future that I’d passed over.  I was so involved in the personal story I failed to understand the importance of the world Michael Frayn was constructing.  To go back and read it now is something of a shock.  First, he was anticipating an online, enveloping world.  We might not have quite reached the point where the affluent can afford to step out of the messy realities of life altogether to live in protected isolation.  It won’t take much more climate change before that becomes real, however.  A Very Private Life’s scenario is getting closer.

Despite its prescience, it is the other aspect of the novel that really strikes home.  As in Orwell’s 1984, people are being managed.  But unlike in Orwell’s account, there’s no Big Brother, no announcements, no restrictions, no demarcations, no overt control.  No, this is a world in which what you want is given to you, any experience you want, a virtual environment that feels real, and one in which you are kept safe.  A world in which you survive by being drugged, and in Frayn’s story there is no moment of choice between the red or the blue pill.  You are absorbed into this virtual life without noticing, without a Neo to appear and uncover the matrix for you.  Here we are, fifty years later and slowly but surely the environment portrayed in A Very Private Life is gently taking over.  Surreptitiously, what you want is what you get – WYWIWYG, not WYSIWYG!

Are we surrounded by an embracing environment, carefully responding to our wants and fantasies?  Of course we are.  Perhaps not quite Uncumber’s world yet, but, as Shoshana Zuboff has written, our environment is characterised by ‘surveillance capitalism’.  I see the evidence every day when I check my emails:  there they are, suggestions from two bookstores (Booktopia and Dymocks), from news organisations including Condé Nast (publisher of The New Yorker), The Economist and The New York Times, various stores (I have managed to unsubscribe from almost all, but somehow Woolworths, BWS and Dan Murphy still get through), Amazon, Simon and Schuster, Netflix, and so the list goes on.  No sooner have I escaped (I hope) from one by ‘unsubscribing’ when another appears.  There are times I feel I’m in a war, a war of attrition, and I am slowly losing!

Surveillance capitalism is the term Shoshana Zuboff coined to describes a marketing strategy where the most valuable commodity is your personal data.  Collecting and analysing this data draws on our use of the internet:  click, and another bit of data about you is stored, retrieved and used to offer you products and services.  Our online behaviour, our likes, dislikes, searches, networks and purchases all disappear into the analytics maw.  Sometimes just an email address is enough:  recently it has been used to send me details of portable power supplies, a ‘revolutionary’ ceramic heater, and a 100x telescopic mobile phone attachment!!

I have written about Zuboff’s work before.  However, it is important to remember that this process started somewhere, and Google was a key player early in the process. They refined the use of data extraction procedures and packaged users’ data to create new markets for themselves and millions of suppliers.  Google processes around 40,000 searches per second, 3.5 billion per day and 1.2 trillion per year.  Now, they are surrounded by other businesses collecting and analysing data.  New sources have dramatically increased the quantity and variety of data available.  In our sensor-based society wearables, smart home devices, drones, connected toys and online systems for travel, cameras, temperature and so much more add to an ever-expanding digitisation of our activities providing data to be collected and used.

Do you need examples?  Commonly used wearables like smart watches and fitness trackers, for example, are becoming part of everyday personal health care practice. Our activities and biometric data can be stored and used to interpret our health and fitness status.  This data is clearly of great value to health insurance providers, to the point I have read that some US insurance providers today require a data feed from a policyholder’s device as a necessary step in entitling them to qualify for continuing insurance cover.

Another example which was reported by the UK’s BBC a couple of years ago illuminated the range of businesses that use data.  Electronic toymaker VTech gathered a lot of data about children via its Kid Connect app that was bundled in with many of the electronic toys it made.  Almost 650,000 children downloaded the app and used it in conjunction with VTech’s educational toys.  The US Federal Trade Commission discovered the app collected personal information but did so without seeking consent from parents or telling children what data was being collected and the uses to which it would be put.  Their poor data security practices meant a hacker could get into the firm’s network and take personal information which included customers’ names as well as email addresses.  The FTC realised they would also be able to hack into an internal database that held copies of encryption keys that, if used, would have let an attacker to obtain photos and audio files of children, uploaded by their parents.

I don’t use Google, even though I am often googling!  Now a confirmed Apple used, I turn to Safari when I need to track something down, and almost always will end up with Wikipedia that way.  I lost patience with Google many years ago because the result of searches always led to a page with results down the left-hand side and advertisements on the right. Who am I kidding?  Do I really believe that Safari protects my data?  When I go to a website, I often click on the ‘cookies acceptance’ box without thinking – well done, lad!  Every few months I remember to clean out those cookies, but that’s too late:  the stable door was open.  As I was writing about 1998, I recalled this was the year Shakespeare in Love was released:  I liked that film, and so checked on Netflix to see what they recommend as similar.  Did I really do that just now, did I just offer up more data about myself?  Uncumber was smart and knew what she didn’t want: I allow myself to be seduced into constantly providing more data.

That day I was researching Pink Floyd had led me on to some astonishingly beautiful singing by Elīna Garanča and Anna Netrebko: Delibes’ Flower Duet from Lakmé; the Barcarolle from Offenbach’s Les Contes d’Hoffman; and Bellini’s Mira O Norma Si, Fino All’ore Estreme from Norma.  From there, I listened to Itzhak Perlman playing Beethoven’s Violin Concerto, and then Kevin Costner’s eulogy at Whitney Houston’s funeral.  All extraordinary performances.  It’s what I wanted that afternoon, and I didn’t care about the consequences:  I’ll probably keep giving away my data if Safari, Google and all the other search tools keep giving me access to moments like these.  Yes, almost certainly, and I should know better!

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