Personalisation as Currency

Abstract

‘Cybercapitalism’, commonly termed ‘digital capitalism’, refers to the Internet, or ‘cyber- space’ and seeks to engage in business models within this territory in order to make financial profit. Cybercapitalism is structured by a highly intricate series of communication networks, which connect us through our participation on social platforms, but outside of these platforms how do we navigate and explore this information superhighway? We do so predominantly through search requests. Algorithms ostensibly know what we want before we even type them, as with Google’s ‘autocomplete’. Thus search is not merely an abstract logic but a lived practice that helps manage and sort the nature of information we seek as well as the direction of our queries. Nowadays it has become clear that users pay for such services with their data, which is increasingly the means to finance various corporations’ growth as they sell this data to third party advertisers. It is a transaction and in the exchange we get relevance. But is this really true?