How does Google earn its money? And how has the company become such a central player in controversies such as biased search results and fake news stories? The answer is simple: Google makes its money by selling words to advertisers. Artist and researcher Dr. Pip Thornton, from the University of Edinburgh, calls this linguistic capitalism: every word you search for on Google is auctioned to the highest bidder. Join Pip to explore not only what words are worth to Google, but what they are worth to you.
Pip is the creator of Newspeak (2019), an installation at EMF 2022.