Google Archipelago: The Digital Gulag and the Simulation of Freedom by Michael RectenwaldMy rating: 4 of 5 stars
"The Google Archipelago has emerged and will expand, effectively becoming conterminous with the full range of human activity, enveloping every social space where people may be found."
Having envisioned the future in this short, non-fiction work, retired academic Rectenwald believes technology—Big Tech—is fashioning a digital gulag similar in its zeal for conformity and repression as the brutal 20th Century Soviet model.
Big Tech is defined as mega-data services, media, cable, internet services, social media platforms, Artificial Intelligence, bots and the apps that dot our phones like chicken pox. Given the homogenized political and social nature of Big Tech, the author describes a grim time ahead for those out of favor with their norms.
In the West, deplatforming, brigading, social shaming, ostracism are taking the place of work camps, firing squads and torture. (Though the current Chinese template of cyber control in the form of social scores backed by prison camps and forced organ harvesting seems an unappealing hybrid.)
There are a few sections where I lost the narrative thread, but the author's overall message of society's absorption into the Google blorg is not hard to believe and easily observable in action.
Readers interested in tech trajectories and their effect on freedom of speech, among other menaced freedoms, should find this a suitable companion.
View all my reviews
