The Unz Review The Wall Street Journal just published a shocking expose, How Google Interferes With Its Search Algorithms and Changes Your Results, [by Kirsten Grind, Sam Schechner, Robert McMillan and John West , November 15, 2019], revealing not only that Google is exploiting its market power in ways the clearly raise anti-trust questions, but also that it shadow-bans sites that promote “hate or violence” even if “expressed in polite or even academic-sounding language”—i.e. VDARE.com and all immigration patriots. This confirms the terrifying message of Michael Rectenwald’s new book Google Archipelago: The Digital Gulag and the Simulation of Freedom: the combination of Woke Capital and monopoly power is turning America into an open-air prison.
Rectenwald is a liberal academic who was chased out of New York University for dissenting mildly from the “pronoun wars” and the Leftist demand for blanket approval of transgenderism [I was a liberal NY prof, but when I said the left was going too far, colleagues called be a NAZI & treated me like a RUSSIAN SPY, RT, November 12, 2019]. In his book, he shows the Left is consumed by collective hysteria, a theme with which VDARE.com readers are familiar, and also that the ideology of “Corporate Socialism” and the emerging “Internet of Things” is making it impossible to escape from a repressive system.
Rectenwald lays out several terms that encapsulate his ideas—the eponymous Google Archipelago, Big Digital, Corporate Socialism, Google Marxism, etc.
- The “Google Archipelago” is “the corporate leftist centralized system of Big Digital.”
- “Big Digital” is the “mega-data services, media, cable, and internet services, social media platforms, Artificial Intelligence (AI) Agents, apps, and the developing Internet of Things” [the increasing ability and dependence of ordinary applications of operating online].
- “Corporate Socialism” is an economic and political system under which a private monopoly or private oligopolies rather than that state eliminates competition and controls all production.
- “Google Marxism”—originally a concept developed by George Gilder, who argued that Google assumed like Marx that the contemporary mode of production is the ultimate mode, with the only remaining issues are questions of distribution.
Rectenwald adds further that Google Marxism, “like “socialism with Chinese characteristics,” manifests as state-supported monopoly capitalism, and “actually existing socialism” [meaning the actual economic conditions that exist, rather than the “free markets” or “democracy” that are claimed to exist] for everyone else.
It’s an unclear definition and he occasionally links it with corporate socialism. But basically what he’s getting at is that Google commands the flow of information and uses this control to further its ideological and commercial objectives, which are often the same thing
In fact, Rectenwald’s concepts often overlap each other, and the recurring academic jargon may baffle the reader who hasn’t read his Foucault.
Yet his three major themes are easy to identify.
- The first major theme: the promotion of far-Left social causes through major corporations.