Beyond the click: interventions in digital adspace

In particular Google, its AdWords marketing platform, and its extensive network of adspace are explored through empirical research to establish: how surveillance capitalism is formed, implemented, and structured; how it creates value; and how agents are able to act and choose in its space-times.

In order to do so, this study diverges from a focus on surveillance capitalism as a universal, cybernetic, and statistical system used to predict and control humans. Instead it looks to the notions of logistics and marketization that enable an approach to capitalism as the ongoing design, implementation, and maintenance of markets by unpredictable, posthuman agents. <br><br>Research-creation, interviews with marketing experts, and (auto)ethnographic analysis were used to conduct an interventionist research project into Google's data markets in ways that engaged and probed their different marketing processes, agents, and objects.