"The New Digital Age" is a startlingly clear and provocative blueprint (1) for technocratic imperialism, from two of its leading witch doctors, Eric Schmidt and Jared Cohen, who construct a new idiom for U.S. global power in the 21st century. This idiom reflects the ever closer union between the State Department and Silicon Valley, as personified by Schmidt, the executive chairman of Google, and Cohen, a former adviser to Condoleezza Rice and Hillary Clinton who is now director of Google Ideas.
The authors met in occupied Baghdad in 2009, when the book was conceived. Strolling (2) among the ruins, the two became excited that consumer technology was transforming a society flattened (3) by U.S. military occupation. They decided the tech industry could be a powerful agent of U.S. foreign policy.
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 prose is terse, the argument confident and the wisdom - banal. But this isn't a book designed to be read. It is a major declaration designed to foster alliances.
"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 (4) has been brought out to give its stamp of approval to this enticement (5) to Western soft power. The acknowledgments give pride of place to Henry Kissinger, who along with Tony Blair and the former CIA director Michael Hayden provided advance praise for the book.
A liberal sprinkling (6) of convenient, hypothetical dark-skinned worthies (7) appear in the book: Congolese fisherwomen, graphic designers in Botswana, anti-corruption 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 (8) the informational supply chain of the Western empire.
The authors offer an expertly banalized version of tomorrow's world: The gadgetry of decades hence is predicted to be much like what we have right now - only cooler. "Progress" 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 U.S. 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 "participation"; and our present world order of systematized domination, intimidation and oppression continues, unmentioned, unafflicted or only faintly perturbed.
The authors are sour about the Egyptian triumph of 2011. They dismiss the Egyptian youth witheringly (9) , claiming that "the mix of activism and arrogance in young people is universal." Digitally inspired mobs mean revolutions will be "easier to start" but "harder to finish." Because of the absence of strong leaders, the result, or so Kissinger tells the authors, will be coalition governments that descend into autocracies. They say there will be "no more springs" (but China is on the ropes).
The authors fantasize about the future of "well resourced" revolutionary groups. A new "crop of consultants" will "use data to build and fine-tune a political figure."
"His" speeches (the future isn't all that different) and writing will be fed "through complex feature-extraction and trend-analysis software suites" while "mapping his brain function," and other "sophisticated diagnostics" will be used to "assess the weak parts of his political repertoire."
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 U.S.-backed plutocracies and dictatorships over the last 30 years, never happened. Referring instead to the region's "aging leaders," the book can't see Latin America for Cuba. And, of course, the book frets (10) theatrically over Washington's favorite boogeymen: North Korea and Iran.
Google, which started out as an expression of independent Californian graduate student culture - a decent, humane and playful culture - has, as it encountered the big, bad world, thrown its lot in with (11) 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 U.S. 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 (12) follows, including a disaster-movie scenario, wherein cyberterrorists take control of U.S. air-traffic control systems and send planes crashing into buildings, shutting down power grids (13) and launching nuclear weapons. The authors then tar activists who engage in digital sit-ins with the same brush (14) .
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 Schmidt and 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.
The section on "repressive autocracies" 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 U.S. In fact, some of those measures - like the push to require every social-network profile to be linked to a real name - were spearheaded by Google itself.
The writing is on the wall (15) , but the authors cannot see it. They borrow from William Dobson the idea that the media, in an autocracy, "allows for an opposition press as long as regime opponents understand where the unspoken limits are." But these trends are beginning to emerge in the U.S. No one doubts the chilling effects of the investigations into The Associated Press and Fox's James Rosen. But there has been little analysis of Google's role in complying with the Rosen subpoena (16) . I have personal experience of these trends.
The Department of Justice admitted in March that it was in its third year of a continuing criminal investigation of WikiLeaks. Court testimony states that its targets include "the founders, owners, or managers of WikiLeaks." One alleged source, Bradley Manning, faces a 12-week trial beginning Monday, with 24 prosecution witnesses expected to testify in secret.
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. "What Lockheed Martin was to the 20th century," they tell us, "technology and cybersecurity companies will be to the 21st." Without even understanding how, they have updated and seamlessly implemented George Orwell's prophecy. If you want a vision of the future, imagine Washington-backed Google Glasses strapped onto vacant human faces - forever. Zealots (17) 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.
GLOSSARY
1. blueprint: model
2. to stroll: passejar
3. to flatten: aplanar
4. warmonger: bel·licista
5. enticement: incentiu
6. a liberal sprinkling: una bona dosi
7. worthies: persones respectables
8. to jack into: endollar
9. witheringly: desdenyosament
10. to fret: preocupar
11. to throw your lot in with: donar tot el seu suport
12. scaremongering: alarmisme
13. power grid: xarxa elèctrica
14. to tar somebody with the same brush: ficar algú dins el mateix sac
15. the writing is on the wall: tot està decidit
16. subpoena: citació judicial
17. zealot: fanàtic
