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Related: Editorials & Other Articles, Issue Forums, Alliance Forums, Region ForumsAssange in the NY Times: The Banality Of "Don't Be Evil"
Assange reviews the book THE New Digital Age by Eric Schmidt, the executive chairman of Google, and Jared Cohen Schmidt, director of Google Ideas.
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/02/opinion/sunday/the-banality-of-googles-dont-be-evil.html?_r=0
The New Digital Age is, beyond anything else, an attempt by Google to position itself as Americas geopolitical visionary the one company that can answer the question Where should America go? It is not surprising that a respectable cast of the worlds most famous warmongers has been trotted out to give its stamp of approval to this enticement to Western soft power. The acknowledgments give pride of place to Henry Kissinger, who along with Tony Blair and the former C.I.A. director Michael Hayden provided advance praise for the book.
In the book the authors happily take up the white geeks burden. A liberal sprinkling of convenient, hypothetical dark-skinned worthies appear: Congolese fisherwomen, graphic designers in Botswana, anticorruption activists in San Salvador and illiterate Masai cattle herders in the Serengeti are all obediently summoned to demonstrate the progressive properties of Google phones jacked into the informational supply chain of the Western empire.
The authors offer an expertly banalized version of tomorrows world: the gadgetry of decades hence is predicted to be much like what we have right now only cooler. Progress is driven by the inexorable spread of American consumer technology over the surface of the earth. Already, every day, another million or so Google-run mobile devices are activated. Google will interpose itself, and hence the United States government, between the communications of every human being not in China (naughty China). Commodities just become more marvelous; young, urban professionals sleep, work and shop with greater ease and comfort; democracy is insidiously subverted by technologies of surveillance, and control is enthusiastically rebranded as participation; and our present world order of systematized domination, intimidation and oppression continues, unmentioned, unafflicted or only faintly perturbed.
The authors are sour about the Egyptian triumph of 2011. They dismiss the Egyptian youth witheringly, claiming that the mix of activism and arrogance in young people is universal. Digitally inspired mobs mean revolutions will be easier to start but harder to finish. Because of the absence of strong leaders, the result, or so Mr. Kissinger tells the authors, will be coalition governments that descend into autocracies. They say there will be no more springs (but China is on the ropes).
In the book the authors happily take up the white geeks burden. A liberal sprinkling of convenient, hypothetical dark-skinned worthies appear: Congolese fisherwomen, graphic designers in Botswana, anticorruption activists in San Salvador and illiterate Masai cattle herders in the Serengeti are all obediently summoned to demonstrate the progressive properties of Google phones jacked into the informational supply chain of the Western empire.
The authors offer an expertly banalized version of tomorrows world: the gadgetry of decades hence is predicted to be much like what we have right now only cooler. Progress is driven by the inexorable spread of American consumer technology over the surface of the earth. Already, every day, another million or so Google-run mobile devices are activated. Google will interpose itself, and hence the United States government, between the communications of every human being not in China (naughty China). Commodities just become more marvelous; young, urban professionals sleep, work and shop with greater ease and comfort; democracy is insidiously subverted by technologies of surveillance, and control is enthusiastically rebranded as participation; and our present world order of systematized domination, intimidation and oppression continues, unmentioned, unafflicted or only faintly perturbed.
The authors are sour about the Egyptian triumph of 2011. They dismiss the Egyptian youth witheringly, claiming that the mix of activism and arrogance in young people is universal. Digitally inspired mobs mean revolutions will be easier to start but harder to finish. Because of the absence of strong leaders, the result, or so Mr. Kissinger tells the authors, will be coalition governments that descend into autocracies. They say there will be no more springs (but China is on the ropes).
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Assange in the NY Times: The Banality Of "Don't Be Evil" (Original Post)
Luminous Animal
Jun 2013
OP
Egalitarian Thug
(12,448 posts)1. K&R So few people have any idea... n/t
HiPointDem
(20,729 posts)2. all the tech companies are evil, for so many reasons...