By JULIAN
ASSANGE
Published:
June 1, 2013
“THE New
Digital Age” 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, and Mr. 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 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.
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 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.
In the book
the authors happily take up the white geek’s 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.
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 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 “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, 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 Mr. 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 United States-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 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 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.
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 United States. 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, 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 United States. 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. 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 tomorrow, 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 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.
Julian
Assange is the editor in chief of WikiLeaks and author of “Cypherpunks: Freedom
and the Future of the Internet.”
