WikiLeaks editor-in-chief Julian Assange (he’s also the co-author of “Cypherpunks: Freedom and the Future of the Internet”) has an outstanding Op-Ed in Sunday’s NY Times, titled: “The Banality of ‘Don’t Be Evil,’” “Formatting a World With No Secrets.”
In the piece, Assange deconstructs a new book by two of Google’s top leaders, executive chairman Eric Schmidt’s and director of Google Ideas Jared Cohen’s (who was a former adviser to both Condoleezza Rice and Hilary Clinton) “The New Digital Age,” “Reshaping the Future of People, Nations and Business.” 315 pages. (April 2013) Alfred A. Knopf. $26.95.
In the opening sentence of his op-ed, Assange refers to the book as: “…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…”
Assange also notes that Schmidt and Cohen, “…decided the tech industry could be a powerful agent of American foreign policy. “
Here are a few more excerpts from it…
The Banality of ‘Don’t Be Evil’
Formatting a World With No Secrets
By JULIAN ASSANGE
NY Times Op-Ed
June 2, 2013
…The book proselytizes the role of technology in reshaping the world’s people and nations into likenesses of the world’s dominant superpower, whether they want to be reshaped or not…
…
…“The New Digital Age” is, beyond anything else, an attempt by Google to position itself as America’s geopolitical visionary — the one company that can answer the question “Where should America go?” It is not surprising that a respectable cast of the world’s 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….
….
…The book mirrors State Department institutional taboos and obsessions. …
…
…Google…has… thrown its lot in with traditional Washington power elements, from the State Department to the National Security Agency.
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 “The Future of Terrorism” 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.
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, “Cypherpunks.” But while Mr. Schmidt and Mr. Cohen tell us that the death of privacy will aid governments in “repressive autocracies” in “targeting their citizens,” they also say governments in “open” democracies will see it as “a gift” enabling them to “better respond to citizen and customer concerns.” In reality, the erosion of individual privacy in the West and the attendant centralization of power make abuses inevitable, moving the “good” societies closer to the “bad” ones…
Without giving away too much more of Assange’s commentary—and it really
is worth a read, IMHO—I will say that, among other topics, he discusses the latest AP and Fox press leak controversies; and, he also echoes something that’s very much along the lines of what Markos Moulitsas stated (per
my post here on July 31, 2012) back in October 2008 when he was asked by Charlie Jane Anders over at Gawker.com’s
Io9 blog
“…to pick one piece of science fiction that you must read or watch before stepping into the voting booth…”
…Markos chose the 1955 classic short story, “Franchise,” by Isaac Asimov…
6 Science Fiction Classics To Help You Choose The Next President
Charlie Jane Anders
Io9.com
October 6, 2008 2:20PM
We asked six political pundits, including Andrew Sullivan and DailyKos' Markos Moulitsas, to pick one piece of science fiction that you must read or watch before stepping into the voting booth next month. After all, science fiction often deals with some of the biggest what-ifs and alternate futures imaginable. So we couldn't imagine any better preparation for participating in democracy than six science fiction classics, as chosen by the experts…
The pundit: Markos Moulitsas (DailyKos)
What they recommended: "Franchise" by Isaac Asimov.
What it's about: This 1955 story is part of Asimov's "Multivac" series of stories. In the futuristic world of 2008, the United States has become an "electronic democracy." Multivac, the super-computer, chooses one lucky person to be "voter of the year." This person, Norman Muller, answers a series of questions and the computer uses those to decide what the results of an election would have been, if an election had happened.
Why is this good election-season material?
Moulitsas tells io9:
We live in a world that has accepted 1984's doublespeak as part and parcel of the political process. But that's too easy and cliched and answer. So how about Asimov's "Franchise"? A single voter, chosen by computer, decides the election, and he's proud that the citizens got to make their voice heard through him, except, of course, that everyone else didn't get to vote. Consider the modern political campaign, with robo polls which proclaim the electorate's choice after a few hundred responses, and robo calls and electronic voting machines and all that stuff, and maybe someone can torture out an analogy. In reality, this election season has been stranger than any fiction imaginable…
As I’ve noted many times in this community over the past couple of years: now moreso than ever, George Orwell is laughing in his grave.