{"id":29612,"date":"2013-06-03T12:00:28","date_gmt":"2013-06-03T11:00:28","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=29612"},"modified":"2015-05-06T12:52:58","modified_gmt":"2015-05-06T11:52:58","slug":"the-banality-of-dont-be-evil","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2013\/06\/the-banality-of-dont-be-evil\/","title":{"rendered":"The Banality of \u2018Don\u2019t Be Evil\u2019"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"assange\"<\/a>\u201cTHE New Digital Age\u201d is a startlingly clear and provocative blueprint for technocratic imperialism, from two of its leading witch doctors, Eric Schmidt and Jared Cohen, who construct a new idiom for United States global power in the 21st century. This idiom reflects the ever closer union between the State Department and Silicon Valley, as personified by Mr. Schmidt, the executive chairman of Google<\/a>, and Mr. Cohen, a former adviser to Condoleezza Rice and Hillary Clinton who is now director of Google Ideas.<\/p>\n

The authors met in occupied Baghdad in 2009, when the book was conceived. Strolling among the ruins, the two became excited that consumer technology was transforming a society flattened by United States military occupation. They decided the tech industry could be a powerful agent of American foreign policy.<\/p>\n

The book proselytizes the role of technology in reshaping the world\u2019s people and nations into likenesses of the world\u2019s dominant superpower, whether they want to be reshaped or not. The prose is terse, the argument confident and the wisdom \u2014 banal. But this isn\u2019t a book designed to be read. It is a major declaration designed to foster alliances.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe New Digital Age\u201d is, beyond anything else, an attempt by Google to position itself as America\u2019s geopolitical visionary \u2014 the one company that can answer the question \u201cWhere should America go?\u201d It is not surprising that a respectable cast of the world\u2019s most famous warmongers has been trotted out to give its stamp of approval to this enticement to Western soft power. The acknowledgments give pride of place to Henry Kissinger, who along with Tony Blair and the former C.I.A. director Michael Hayden provided advance praise for the book.<\/p>\n

In the book the authors happily take up the white geek\u2019s burden. A liberal sprinkling of convenient, hypothetical dark-skinned worthies appear: Congolese fisherwomen, graphic designers in Botswana, anticorruption activists in San Salvador and illiterate Masai cattle herders in the Serengeti are all obediently summoned to demonstrate the progressive properties of Google phones jacked into the informational supply chain of the Western empire.<\/p>\n

The authors offer an expertly banalized version of tomorrow\u2019s world: the gadgetry of decades hence is predicted to be much like what we have right now \u2014 only cooler. \u201cProgress\u201d is driven by the inexorable spread of American consumer technology over the surface of the earth. Already, every day, another million or so Google-run mobile devices are activated. Google will interpose itself, and hence the United States government, between the communications of every human being not in China (naughty China). Commodities just become more marvelous; young, urban professionals sleep, work and shop with greater ease and comfort; democracy is insidiously subverted by technologies of surveillance, and control is enthusiastically rebranded as \u201cparticipation\u201d; and our present world order of systematized domination, intimidation and oppression continues, unmentioned, unafflicted or only faintly perturbed.<\/p>\n

The authors are sour about the Egyptian triumph of 2011. They dismiss the Egyptian youth witheringly, claiming that \u201cthe mix of activism and arrogance in young people is universal.\u201d Digitally inspired mobs mean revolutions will be \u201ceasier to start\u201d but \u201charder to finish.\u201d Because of the absence of strong leaders, the result, or so Mr. Kissinger tells the authors, will be coalition governments that descend into autocracies. They say there will be \u201cno more springs\u201d (but China is on the ropes).<\/p>\n

The authors fantasize about the future of \u201cwell resourced\u201d revolutionary groups. A new \u201ccrop of consultants\u201d will \u201cuse data to build and fine-tune a political figure.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cHis\u201d speeches (the future isn\u2019t all that different) and writing will be fed \u201cthrough complex feature-extraction and trend-analysis software suites\u201d while \u201cmapping his brain function,\u201d and other \u201csophisticated diagnostics\u201d will be used to \u201cassess the weak parts of his political repertoire.\u201d<\/p>\n

The book mirrors State Department institutional taboos and obsessions. It avoids meaningful criticism of Israel and Saudi Arabia. It pretends, quite extraordinarily, that the Latin American sovereignty movement, which has liberated so many from United States-backed plutocracies and dictatorships over the last 30 years, never happened. Referring instead to the region\u2019s \u201caging leaders,\u201d the book can\u2019t see Latin America for Cuba. And, of course, the book frets theatrically over Washington\u2019s favorite boogeymen: North Korea and Iran.<\/p>\n

Google, which started out as an expression of independent Californian graduate student culture \u2014 a decent, humane and playful culture \u2014 has, as it encountered the big, bad world, thrown its lot in with traditional Washington power elements, from the State Department to the National Security Agency.<\/p>\n

Despite accounting for an infinitesimal fraction of violent deaths globally, terrorism is a favorite brand in United States policy circles. This is a fetish that must also be catered to, and so \u201cThe Future of Terrorism\u201d gets a whole chapter. The future of terrorism, we learn, is cyberterrorism. A session of indulgent scaremongering follows, including a breathless disaster-movie scenario, wherein cyberterrorists take control of American air-traffic control systems and send planes crashing into buildings, shutting down power grids and launching nuclear weapons. The authors then tar activists who engage in digital sit-ins with the same brush.<\/p>\n

I have a very different perspective. The advance of information technology epitomized by Google heralds the death of privacy for most people and shifts the world toward authoritarianism. This is the principal thesis in my book, \u201cCypherpunks.\u201d But while Mr. Schmidt and Mr. Cohen tell us that the death of privacy will aid governments in \u201crepressive autocracies\u201d in \u201ctargeting their citizens,\u201d they also say governments in \u201copen\u201d democracies will see it as \u201ca gift\u201d enabling them to \u201cbetter respond to citizen and customer concerns.\u201d In reality, the erosion of individual privacy in the West and the attendant centralization of power make abuses inevitable, moving the \u201cgood\u201d societies closer to the \u201cbad\u201d ones.<\/p>\n

The section on \u201crepressive autocracies\u201d describes, disapprovingly, various repressive surveillance measures: legislation to insert back doors into software to enable spying on citizens, monitoring of social networks and the collection of intelligence on entire populations. All of these are already in widespread use in the United States. In fact, some of those measures \u2014 like the push to require every social-network profile to be linked to a real name \u2014 were spearheaded by Google itself.<\/p>\n

THE writing is on the wall, but the authors\u00a0cannot see it. They borrow from William Dobson the idea that the media, in an autocracy, \u201callows for an opposition press as long as regime opponents understand where the unspoken limits are.\u201d But these trends are beginning to emerge in the United States. No one doubts the chilling effects of the investigations into The Associated Press and Fox\u2019s James Rosen. But there has been little analysis of Google\u2019s role in complying with the Rosen subpoena. I have personal experience of these trends.<\/p>\n

The Department of Justice admitted in March that it was in its third year of a continuing criminal investigation<\/a> of WikiLeaks. Court testimony states that its targets include \u201cthe founders, owners, or managers of WikiLeaks.\u201d One alleged source, Bradley Manning, faces a 12-week trial beginning tomorrow, with 24 prosecution witnesses expected to testify in secret.<\/p>\n

This book is a balefully seminal work in which neither author has the language to see, much less to express, the titanic centralizing evil they are constructing. \u201cWhat Lockheed Martin was to the 20th century,\u201d they tell us, \u201ctechnology and cybersecurity companies will be to the 21st.\u201d Without even understanding how, they have updated and seamlessly implemented George Orwell\u2019s prophecy. If you want a vision of the future, imagine Washington-backed Google Glasses strapped onto vacant human faces \u2014 forever. Zealots of the cult of consumer technology will find little to inspire them here, not that they ever seem to need it. But this is essential reading for anyone caught up in the struggle for the future, in view of one simple imperative: Know your enemy.<\/p>\n

_____________________________<\/p>\n

Julian Assange is the editor in chief of WikiLeaks and author of \u201cCypherpunks: Freedom and the Future of the Internet.\u201d<\/i><\/p>\n

Go to Original \u2013 nytimes.com<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\u201cThe New Digital Age\u201d is an attempt by Google to position itself as America\u2019s geopolitical visionary. Without even understanding how, they have updated and seamlessly implemented George Orwell\u2019s prophecy. If you want a vision of the future, imagine Washington-backed Google Glasses strapped onto vacant human faces \u2014 forever. But this is essential reading for anyone caught up in the struggle for the future, in view of one simple imperative: Know your enemy.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[45,62,139,60],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-29612","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-activism","category-media","category-justice","category-whistleblowing-surveillance"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29612","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=29612"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29612\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=29612"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=29612"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=29612"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}