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    Re: Time for a refresher- Julian Assange: Google Is Not What It Seems. Archived Message

    Posted by brooks on May 4, 2019, 2:45 pm, in reply to "Time for a refresher- Julian Assange: Google Is Not What It Seems. "

    Wow. That is a brilliant and powerful article. Assange really is one of the most important thinkers of the era. Even apart from Wikileaks publications, one can see from this analysis why he is seen as such a threat. Thanks for that Ken, I don't remember having read this before, though I do remember him speaking in an interview of the strange case of Lisa Shields contacting him on behalf of Clinton, and that Google was literally in bed with the State Dept. But there is way more information and analysis here. One begins to wonder whether characters like Schmidt and Cohen have more real power than even the CIA. What a bizarre matrix we are living in. One of many brilliant passages:

    Billed as a visionary forecast of global technological change, the book [Schmidt's and Cohen's on the New Digital Age] failed to deliver—failed even to imagine a future, good or bad, substantially different to the present. The book was a simplistic fusion of Fukuyama “end of history” ideology—out of vogue since the 1990s—and faster mobile phones. It was padded out with DC shibboleths, State Department orthodoxies, and fawning grabs from Henry Kissinger. The scholarship was poor—even degenerate. It did not seem to fit the profile of Schmidt, that sharp, quiet man in my living room. But reading on I began to see that the book was not a serious attempt at future history. It was a love song from Google to official Washington. Google, a burgeoning digital superstate, was offering to be Washington’s geopolitical visionary.

    One way of looking at it is that it’s just business. For an American internet services monopoly to ensure global market dominance it cannot simply keep doing what it is doing, and let politics take care of itself. American strategic and economic hegemony becomes a vital pillar of its market dominance. What’s a megacorp to do? If it wants to straddle the world, it must become part of the original “don’t be evil” empire.

    But part of the resilient image of Google as “more than just a company” comes from the perception that it does not act like a big, bad corporation. Its penchant for luring people into its services trap with gigabytes of “free storage” produces the perception that Google is giving it away for free, acting directly contrary to the corporate profit motive. Google is perceived as an essentially philanthropic enterprise—a magical engine presided over by otherworldly visionaries—for creating a utopian future.68 The company has at times appeared anxious to cultivate this image, pouring funding into “corporate responsibility” initiatives to produce “social change”—exemplified by Google Ideas. But as Google Ideas shows, the company’s “philanthropic” efforts, too, bring it uncomfortably close to the imperial side of US influence. If Blackwater/Xe Services/Academi was running a program like Google Ideas, it would draw intense critical scrutiny.69 But somehow Google gets a free pass.

    Whether it is being just a company or “more than just a company,” Google’s geopolitical aspirations are firmly enmeshed within the foreign-policy agenda of the world’s largest superpower. As Google’s search and internet service monopoly grows, and as it enlarges its industrial surveillance cone to cover the majority of the world’s population, rapidly dominating the mobile phone market and racing to extend internet access in the global south, Google is steadily becoming the internet for many people.70 Its influence on the choices and behavior of the totality of individual human beings translates to real power to influence the course of history.

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