Google Archipelago: The Digital Gulag and the Simulation of Freedom Audiobook

Google Archipelago: The Digital Gulag and the Simulation of Freedom explores the reach, penetration, power, and impact of Big Digital or the mega-information managers, social media platforms, Artificial Intelligence developers, providers of other web applications and functionalities, and the architects and proponents of the promised Internet of Things. Alphabet (Google, YouTube, etc.) Facebook and Instagram, Twitter, Yelp, and LinkedIn, as well as their many subsidiaries and competitors, comprise a digital collective Big Digital whose domain is global and whose ideological and functional power represents a force unlike any other in history.

Big Digital, a non-governmental constellation of digital technology corporations, now presides over public and private life to such an extent that it rivals, if not surpassing, the governmental reach and penetration of many national governments, combined. Big Digital represents a new private form of government, or a governmentality, the means by which populations are governed, and the technologies that enable that governance. But the constraints of the political field superintended by Big Digital include more than censorship and bias. Constraints are structurally determined by the technology.

The primary means behind Big Digital’s governmental functions is ideology. And the ideology of Big Digital is decidedly leftist. I call Big Digital’s ideology corporate leftism, or to borrow from and redefine a phrase coined by George Gilder, “Google Marxism”. Corporate leftism comprises the set of values and beliefs now lodged within a growing number of US and other corporations. Corporate leftism informs the policies, politics, and procedures of Big Digital.

But corporate leftism is also disseminated well beyond the work cultures of Big Digital’s corporate headquarters and regional sites. Corporate leftism is not a subsidiary feature or incidental aspect of Big Digital. Leftism is coded into the very DNA of Big Digital technology and replicated with every organizational offshoot and new technology. Big Digital’s leftist ideology circulates through the deep neural networks of cyberspace and other digital spheres. Corporate leftism is intrinsic to the structure of the Internet, the cloud, algorithms, apps, AI bots, social media services, web navigation tracking software systems, virtual assistants, and more.

Google Archipelago tells the story of how Silicon Valley’s digital technology corporations became bastions of leftism how, why, and to what ends corporate leftism constituted and informed Big Digital, while still promoting the commercial objectives of its digital global conglomerates and extending their reach as a private governmentality. Big Digital’s corporate leftism is authoritarian to the core and the leading governmentality in today’s world is the corporate leftist authoritarianism that I call the Google Archipelago.