Book ‘Google Archipelago’ Exposes the growing threat of ‘Big Digital’ and ‘Corporate Marxism’
Dr. Rich Swier writes:
“The beauty of the Internet is that it connects people. The value is in the other people. If we start to believe that the Internet itself is an entity that has something to say, we’re devaluing those people and making ourselves into idiots.” – Jaron Lanier, “Digital Maoism: The Hazards of the New Online Collectivism.”
Former New York University (NYU) professor Michael Rectenwald, author of nine books including Springtime for Snowflakes: ‘Social Justice’ and Its Postmodern Parentage, has published his most recent analysis of our society in a book titled Google Archipelago: The Digital Gulag and the Simulation of Freedom.
Michael Rectenwald was a professor at NYU from 2008 to 2019. He is a pundit and champion of free speech against all forms of authoritarianism and totalitarianism, including socialism-communism, “social justice,” fascism, and Political Correctness. He pulls no punches in his critique of big digital and corporate Marxism in Google Archipelago.
Professor Rectenwald writes:
Leftist authoritarianism, or authoritarian leftism, is the operation ethos of the Google Archipelago.
What is the Google Archipelago?
The title of Professor Rectenwald’s book is a parody of Russian novelist, historian, winner of the Nobel Prize for literature in 1970, and prisoner of the former Soviet Union Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s 1973 book Gulag Archipelago. Professor Rectenwald, like Solzhenitsyn, is an outspoken critic of Communism and is helping raise awareness of the dual threats of big digital and corporate Marxism. Systems not unlike the old Gulag labor camp system in the former Soviet Union, but with a twist.
In 1945 Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn was arrested for criticizing Stalin in private correspondence and sentenced to an eight-year term in a labour camp (gulag), to be followed by permanent internal exile. The Gulag was a system of forced labor camps established during Joseph Stalin’s long reign as dictator of the Soviet Union. The word “Gulag” is an acronym for Glavnoe Upravlenie Lagerei, or Main Camp Administration. The notorious prisons, which incarcerated about 18 million people throughout their history, operated from the 1920s until shortly after Stalin’s death in 1953. At its height, the Gulag network included hundreds of labor camps that held anywhere from 2,000 to 10,000 people each. Conditions at the Gulag were brutal: Prisoners could be required to work up to 14 hours a day, often in extreme weather. Many died of starvation, disease or exhaustion—others were simply executed. The atrocities of the Gulag system have had a long-lasting impact that still permeates Russian society today.
Today’s Google Archipelago mirrors the Soviet Gulag but without the torture, starvation, disease. The new Google Archipelago is still a prison camp but one of our own making. Every user of big digital and those who work for and with the corporate Marxists are prisoners in a gulag of our own making. The potential number of people in the Google Archipelago is in the billions.
Professor Rectenwald notes:
[T]he goliaths of the Google Archipelago justify increasingly liberal politics and procedures, an authoritarianism rampant within corporate cultures and coexistence with the Google Archipelago at large. The political culture of the ‘wokeforces’ in the ‘wokeplaces’ of Facebook, Goggle, Twitter and elsewhere metastasize to become the character of cyberspace.
[ … ]
The inward-facing wokeplace resembles a high-tech Red Guard engagement in digital struggle sessions reminiscent of the Maoist Cultural Revolution (1966-1976).
Rectenwald warns, “If not a perfervid, cultish social-justice or woke activist, or at least an occasional virtue signaler of the ‘correct’ positions, one’s individual membership in one or more subordinated category may be rendered inert.”
For those who have been placed in Facebook jail, banned from posting on YouTube or deplatformed by Twitter it is understandable why everyone must wake up to the dangers of corporate Marxism.
Conclusion
Michael Rectenwald‘s book is a must read if you want to understand who is controlling your data and thereby controlling your life. Rectenwald writes:
As the history of the twentieth century vividly illustrates, when Marxism is ascendant, the ‘wrong’ have no rights, and the number of the wrong multiplies by the day. The evidence is in: the digital gulag is under construction.
Question: Do you believe that your cell phone knows more about you than you spouse or significant other? If your answer is yes then you are already prisoner of the “digital gulag.” Now you hopefully realize it.