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Google Archipelago: The Digital Gulag and the Simulation of
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Google Archipelago: The Digital Gulag and the Simulation of Freedom begins with familiar cultural
politics as points of entry to the book's theme regarding the reach, penetration, and soon the
ubiquity of the digital world. In a book about enormous sea changes brought about by digital
technology, Google Archipelagobegins and ends with the political, in particular with the objectives
of the Big Digi&#173talconglomerates as global corporate monopoly capitalists or would-bemonopolies.Google
Archipelago argues that Big Digital technologies and their principals represent
not only economic powerhouses but also new forms of governmental power. The technologies of
Big Digital not only amplify, extend, and lend precision to the powers of the state, they may
represent elements of a new corporate state power.In contrast to academics who study digital
media and bemoan such supposed horrors as digital exploitation, in Google Archipelago, Michael
Rectenwald argues that the real danger posed by Big Digital is not digital capitalism as such, but
leftist authoritarianism, a political outlook shared by academic leftists, who thus cannot recognize it
in their object of study. Thus, while imagining that they are radical critics of Big Digital, academic
digital media scholars (whom Rectenwald terms the digitalistas ) actually serve as ideological
smokescreens that obscure its real character.Two chapters interrupt the book's genre as nonfiction
prose. Part historical science fiction and part memoir, these chapters render the story of a
Soviet Gu&#173lagsurvivor and defector, and the author's earlier digital self. Google Archipelago
intentionally blurs the lines between argument and story, fact and artifact, the real and the
imaginary. This is necessary, Rectenwald argues, because one cannot pretend to describe the
Google Archipelago as if from without, as something apart from experience. In any case, soon one
will no longer go on the Internet. The Internet and cyberspace will be everywhere, while humans
and other agents will be digital artifacts within it.The Google Archipelago represents the
coextension of digitization and physical social space, the conversion of social space and its
inhabitants into digital artifacts, and the potential to control populations to degrees unimagined by
the likes of Stalin, Hitler, or Mao.