![]() to Nixon, but whether there will be a President at all.”8 Back then, anybody suggesting Google might be the herald of a new kind of dystopia, rather than a techno-utopia, would have been laughed out of the room. As Wired’s Louis Rossetto wrote in 1995, “Everything we know will be different. Maybe this really was the beginning of a new, highly networked world order, where the old structures-militaries, corporations, governments-were helpless before the leveling power of the Internet. ![]() That’s the story you’ll find in just about every popular book on Google: a gee-whiz tale about two brilliant nerds from Stanford who turned a college project into an epoch-defining New Economy dynamo, a company that embodied every utopian promise of the networked society: empowerment, knowledge, democracy. The first part of this expansive book details the issues facing ocean ecosystems in a manner that makes one wonder why there aren’t more marine biologist-ecoterrorists. The Ocean of Life: The Fate of Man and the Sea Callum Roberts 2012. It convinced its users that everything it did was driven by a desire to help humanity. Further reading: Bullshit Jobs, by David Graeber Surveillance Valley, by Yasha Levine. ![]() “Even as it expanded into a transnational multi-billion-dollar corporation, Google managed to retain its geekily innocent “Don’t Be Evil” image. ![]()
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