Google-Archipelago-The-Digital-Gulag-and-the-Simulation-of-Freedom

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Google Archipelago: The Digital Gulag and the Simulation of
Freedom
Sinopsis :
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 non-fiction 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.