"[Governance] is at its best when it can fade into the background, assisting you throughout your day whenever you need it": Google Agrees to Purchase Fitbit

(Pix Credit: Google buying Fitbit could save Wear OS from certain doom)

"We believe technology is at its best when it can fade into the background, assisting you throughout your day whenever you need it. Wearable devices, like smartwatches and fitness trackers, do just that—you can easily see where your next meeting is with just a glance of an eye or monitor your daily activity right from your wrist."

It was with those words that Rick Osterloh, Google's Senior Vice President, Devices & Services, announced via his blog post that "that Google has entered into a definitive agreement to acquire Fitbit, a leading wearables brand." (Blog post HERE). 

The reaction was predictable.

The acquisition is likely to face regulatory scrutiny from agencies already investigating Google for antitrust concerns, because Fitbit collects sensitive information from users through the device. In an effort to head off that potentially thorny point, Google said it would not use health data gleaned from Fitbit devices in its core advertising business.

“You will always be in control of your data, and we will remain transparent about the data we collect and why,” Fitbit’s chief executive, James Park, said in an email to his company’s customers on Friday morning. “We never sell your personal information, and Fitbit health and wellness data will not be used for Google ads.” (Daisuke Wakabayashi and Adam Satariano; "Google to Buy Fitbit for $2.1 Billion," New York Times (1 Nov. 2019)).

Others noted: "Buying Fitbit could help Google extend its “ambient computing” hardware strategy, where the company aims to be a part of users’ lives wherever they are. The company has hinted at its health and hardware ambitions with the introduction of several new products in October, including the new Pixel 4 smartphone, and the hiring of former Geisinger Health CEO David Feinberg last year to consolidate its health-care strategy" (Google to acquire Fitbit, valuing the smartwatch maker at about $2.1 billion).

The immediate object, of course, is to induce a large enough mass of individuals to "own or are think of buying into the Google wearable ecosystem" (Google buying Fitbit could save Wear OS from certain doom) to make that ecosystem both viable and productive to the larger strategy of growing the meta-ecology with Google at its core. That larger ecosystem, then, in turn would be in a position to augment the size and value of that ecosystem through interactions with the other great productive ecosystems that are autonomous production and regulatory chains (Mattheis, The System Theory of Niklas Luhmann). 

And that is the point of this little story embedded within a much more potent trajectory of change to the way in which liberal democracies committed to markets recast their governance foundations through data driven markers-objectives (macro and micro) overseen by a competitive private sector charged to prevent, mitigate and remedy risk. To that end, the architectures of systems and their mechanics of control are changing. And that is what makes the proposed purpose of Fitbit by Google interesting.  That interest is not merely a matter of competition (monopoly) law, or even of its effects on the "privacy" rights of individuals (in a context where aggregated data is the  prize--and the means by which such individual data is marked and those producing it managed); it is a matter of the of the way in which the society chooses to control its populations. 

It is in this context that the opening comment of the senior leader of Google assumes a much more interesting set of possibilities--far removed for the more prosaic concerns of market power, privacy or even conventional legal systems.  "[Governance] is at its best when it can fade into the background, assisting you throughout your day whenever you need it" HERE). The purchase, then, might provide a glimpse at the "Sinews of Power" (parallel HERE) for this age in which increasingly the only fuel for governance, for the control of populations, is data.  And it is through this purchase that the differences and similarities between the construction of state-based data-driven governance systems in China can be usefully considered in the shadow of the construction of our own.