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- Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Sprache: Englisch
In the wake of Edward Snowden's revelations, and concern that the internet has heightened rather than combatted various forms of political and social inequality, it is time we ask: What comes after a broken internet? Ramesh Srinivasan and Adam Fish reimagine the internet from the perspective of grassroots activists and citizens on the margins of political and economic power. They explore how the fragments of the existing internet are being utilised - alongside a range of peoples, places, and laws - to make change possible. From indigenous and non-western communities and activists in Tahrir Square, to imprisoned hackers and whistleblowers, this book illustrates how post-digital cultures are changing the internet as we know it - from a system which is increasingly centralized, commodified, and "personalized", into something more in line with its original spirit: autonomous, creative, subversive. The book looks past the limitations of the internet, reconceptualizing network technology in relation to principles of justice and equality. Srinivasan and Fish advocate for an internet that blends the local concerns of grassroots communities and activists with the need to achieve scalable change and transformation. Written by two highly respected scholars in the field, this compelling book is essential reading for anyone concerned with the quality and future of the internet.
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2017
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Table of Contents
Dedication
Title page
Copyright page
List of Figures
Acknowledgments
Introduction: After the Internet
Is the Internet Shit?
Surveillance and Freedom
Sharing Economy
Neoliberalism in Action
Perilous Myths
Fragments and Assemblages
After the Internet
1: Reimagining Technology with Global Communities
Digital Divides and Their Apostles
Thinking Locally
Indigenous Digital Networks: Tribal Peace
The Middle Way: Performing Knowledge and Technology at Zuni
Lateral Sound: Making the Margins – a New Center in Oaxaca, Mexico
Curbing Our Digital Enthusiasm
2: Hacking the Hacktivists
Recent Histories of Hacktivism
The Battle between Agency and Structure
Netwar
Selfie-incrimination
Versioning
Edgework
“Pushing the Boundaries” with the NSA and GCHQ
Discussion
3: Media Activism: Shaping Online and Offline Networks
Facebook Revolution?
Social Media Binaries
Participatory Politics
A Contextual Turn
Assembling and Disassembling
Intuition and Media Activism: Stories from the Mosireen Collective
Overcoming Bubbles
Viral Media
Where Assemblages Cannot Tread
Activist Assemblages Onward
4: After the Cloud: Do Silk Roads Lead to Data Havens?
Watching Clouds
Big Data and the Metaphor of the Cloud
Policy, the State, and Information Activism
Iceland as a Data Haven: The History of an Idea
A Closer Look at the International Modern Media Institute
Data Retention, Data Protection, and Intermediary Limited Liability
Data Entrepreneurialism and Data Centers
Extra-territorial Surveillance: Seizure and Policing of Servers
Conclusion
Coda
References
Index
End User License Agreement
List of Illustrations
Figure 1.1 Interface of the Tribal Peace Native American system
Figure 1.2 The first version of a fluid ontology created with tribal communities across San Diego County
Figure 1.3 Zuni leadership examining an indigenous map
Source:
Ramesh Srinivasan
Figure 1.4 Zuni community members collectively viewing digital objects via
Amidolanne
Source:
Ramesh Srinivasan
Figure 2.1 Higinio O. Ochoa III's selfie-incrimination
Figure 2.2 Ross Ulbricht's LinkedIn page
Figure 2.3 GCHQ's JTRIG computer network attacks (CNA)
Figure 3.1 Social media revolution t-shirt
Source:
Ramesh Srinivasan.
Figure 3.2 The Tweet-Nadwa (or “Tweet up”) bringing activists together with real-time conversations online in Cairo, June 2011
Source:
Ramesh Srinivasan
Figure 3.3 Mosireen space
Source:
Khalid Abdalla, Mosireen
Figure 3.4 Tahrir Cinema
Source:
Sherief Gaber, Mosireen
Figure 3.5 Military helicopter dropping flags on protesters in Cairo's Tahrir Square, early July 2013
Source:
Ramesh Srinivasan
Figure 4.1 NSA's New Collection Posture
Source:
Wikimedia Commons
Figure 4.2 NSA Data Center in Utah
Source:
Wikimedia Commons
Figure 4.3 The house in Reykjavik where WikiLeaks worked
Source:
Adam Fish
Guide
Cover
Table of Contents
Start Reading
CHAPTER 1
Index
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Dedication
Dedicated to Levi Felix (1984–2017)
Copyright page
Copyright © Ramesh Srinivasan and Adam Fish 2017
The right of Ramesh Srinivasan and Adam Fish to be identified as Authors of this Work has been asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
First published in 2017 by Polity Press
Polity Press
65 Bridge Street
Cambridge CB2 1UR, UK
Polity Press
101 Station Landing
Suite 300
Medford, MA 02155
USA
All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purpose of criticism and review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.
ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-0617-0
ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-0618-7 (pb)
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Srinivasan, Ramesh, author. | Fish, Adam, author.
Title: After the Internet / Ramesh Srinivasan, Adam Fish.
Description: Cambridge, UK ; Malden, MA : Polity Press, 2017. | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2017009318 (print) | LCCN 2017026160 (ebook) | ISBN 9781509506200 (Mobi) | ISBN 9781509506217 (Epub) | ISBN 9781509506170 (hardback) | ISBN 9781509506187 (pbk.)
Subjects: LCSH: Internet–Social aspects. | Internet–Economic aspects.
Classification: LCC HM851 (ebook) | LCC HM851 .S725 2017 (print) | DDC 302.23/1–dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017009318
Typeset in 10.5 on 12 pt Sabon by Toppan Best-set Premedia Limited
Printed and bound in the United Kingdom by Clays Ltd, St Ives PLC.
The publisher has used its best endeavours to ensure that the URLs for external websites referred to in this book are correct and active at the time of going to press. However, the publisher has no responsibility for the websites and can make no guarantee that a site will remain live or that the content is or will remain appropriate.
Every effort has been made to trace all copyright holders, but if any have been inadvertently overlooked the publisher will be pleased to include any necessary credits in any subsequent reprint or edition.
For further information on Polity, visit our website: politybooks.com
List of Figures
1.1 Interface of the Tribal Peace Native American system
1.2 The first version of a fluid ontology created with tribal communities across San Diego County
1.3 Zuni leadership examining an indigenous map
1.4 Zuni community members collectively viewing digital objects via Amidolanne
2.1 Higinio O. Ochoa III's selfie-incrimination
2.2 Ross Ulbricht's LinkedIn page
2.3 GCHQ's JTRIG computer network attacks (CNA)
3.1 Social media revolution t-shirt
3.2 The Tweet-Nadwa (or “Tweet up”) bringing activists together with real-time conversations online in Cairo, June 2011
3.3 Mosireen space
3.4 Tahrir Cinema
3.5 Military helicopter dropping flags on protesters in Cairo's Tahrir Square, early July 2013
4.1 NSA's New Collection Posture
4.2 NSA Data Center in Utah
4.3 The house in Reykjavik where WikiLeaks worked
Acknowledgments
Ramesh is truly grateful to his dear friend and conspirator Adam Fish for the inspiration to work together to fight for an internet in line with principles of democracy and social justice. This book marks but the latest in nearly a dozen years of collaboration. It could not have been written by either of us alone but comes from the union of the authors and exceeds the sum of each of us individually.
Ramesh thanks his sublime partner Syama for all her support in helping him dedicate himself to making this book possible. He also is truly grateful for the presence, love, and care of his parents Seenu and Sita and brother Mahesh. He thanks his incredible informants from across the world who have taught him the power of fighting for community sovereignty, equality, and a more ethical world. He thanks the National Science Foundation, UCLA, the Southern California Tribal Chairmen's Association, the A:shiwi A:wan Museum and Heritage Center, Rhizomatica, and the inspiring figures, particularly from the Mosireen collective, with whom he broke bread over three years in the midst of Tahrir Square and its transformations.
Adam thanks Ramesh for a decade of collaborative creative work and play. Lucas Follis deserves thanks for sharing his wisdom and generating many ideas around hacktivism. Ideas for chapter 2 were first explored in discussions with him and resulted in A. Fish & L. Follis, “Edgework, State Power, and Hacktivists,” Hau: Journal of Ethnographic Theory, 5(2) (2015): 383–90 and A. Fish & L. Follis, “Gagged and Doxed: Hacktivism's Self-Incrimination Complex,” International Journal of Communication, 10 (2016): 3281–300.
The research in Iceland was funded by the European Cooperation in Science and Technology, COST Action IS1202; Security Lancaster; the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences at Lancaster University; and the Department of Sociology at the University of Lancaster. Thanks go out to the University of Iceland for their generous visiting professorship in the summer of 2015. Alex Johnson should be thanked for her help in finding pirates and data centers in Iceland. Adam thanks his wife Robin for her love, support, and endurance, and his daughter Io for providing play and comic relief.
Together, we dedicate this book to the memory of our inspiring friend and brother Levi Felix, a visionary in his life. His work focused on creating greater mindful awareness in our interactions with technology remains a guiding light for us both.
Introduction: After the Internet
We are creating a world where anyone, anywhere may express his or her beliefs, no matter how singular, without fear of being coerced into silence or conformity.
(Barlow 1996)
In his bold declaration of the independence of cyberspace, John Perry Barlow, founder of the Electronic Frontier Foundation and a well-known figure in internet counterculture circles, proudly announced that networked technology would bring the world together as a singular and “free” space. His words, quoted above, speak to optimistic and aspirational principles that imagine the internet as autonomous from control, surveillance, and manipulation. This reflects an ideology that prioritizes individual liberty over the practices of the state or society.
These words from Barlow represent an important philosophy by which the internet has been imagined and described. Yet now, over 20 years since Barlow's declaration, the internet and what it stands for remains contested. Commercial, governmental, public, and activist interests are in conflict and dialogue as we think about the future of the internet.
We have long heard about the democratic promise of the internet. As a decentralized network, the internet would empower its users equally. It would evade the top-down political economies of corporations that have monopolized older media networks of television and radio. It could embolden citizens to share their stories, design different sites, and mobilize and network from the grassroots. It would transform our world into a “global village” (Srinivasan 2017). Yet whose global village are we speaking about? And has such a global village of equality come to be?
There remains both considerable support for and critique of Barlow's claims. Several writers use his words as an example of the libertarian ideology present in technoliberal culture (Fish 2017b), explaining that Barlow mistakenly treats technology as autonomous and transcendent. Indeed, in a recent interview with Wired magazine noting the anniversary of the declaration, Barlow revealed that he still firmly believes in what he wrote in the 1996 document – that cyberspace is “naturally immune to sovereignty” and always will be (Greenberg 2016). In this sense, he treats the internet as deterritorialized (Deleuze & Guattari 1983), as existing above and beyond laws, contexts, places, and peoples.
Many dispute this, however. Andy Greenberg (2016), for example, provides a variety of examples that serve to discredit Barlow's claim. Greenberg notes recent political speeches, such as one from former French president Nicholas Sarkozy in 2013, that argue for the need to increase internet governance. Greenberg also notes the internet's dependency on a range of other infrastructures. Thus, from this perspective, one cannot cleanly disentangle the internet from related social, political, and cultural factors.
Andres Guadamuz (2016) builds on Greenberg's observation by citing the problematic “digital dualism” (Jurgenson 2012) that is inherent in Barlow's declaration. There is a mistaken duality between the digital and physical worlds that fails to recognize how they shape one another, he argues. Additionally, Guadamuz points to two other major flaws with the declaration: its exclusion of non-governmental forms of regulation and its Western-centric focus. That said, Guadamuz praises Barlow's declaration as a type of aspiration, highlighting the need to develop technologies and infrastructures that can overcome the corruption of existing political institutions that threaten human rights and free speech.
Further challenging Barlow's assertions of autonomy in cyberspace, Woody Evans (2016) notes the presence of internet governance institutions such as the International Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) and the Worldwide Web Consortium (W3C). Their existence is evidence that the internet is in fact centralized and hierarchical, despite being lauded as the opposite. Evans' main argument centers on refuting the essentialism of cyberspace that Barlow encourages. The internet therefore cannot be treated independently of cultural, social, and political practices.
Jessica Beyer and Fenwick McKelvey (2015) offer a different perspective on Barlow's 1996 claims. Their focus is on grassroots practices that are supported by networked digital technologies, like the internet. They present a number of examples that support Barlow's belief that cyberspace offers particular advantages for combating and resisting government regulation and intervention. Through a detailed discussion of the historical significance and trajectory of projects like Napster, BitTorrent, and MojoNation, the authors present digital piracy as a symbol of non-hierarchical organization and resistance to state power. In broad alignment with Barlow's current claims as expressed in the 2016 Wired interview, Beyer and McKelvey ultimately endorse these examples – even despite some of their failures – because of their capacity to undermine state power and control. Thus, even if governance institutions do attempt to control the internet, activists, hackers, and the public can weaken these through their subversive practices.
We share these different perspectives around Barlow's declaration to explain how contested the internet and what it signifies actually is. In a rhetorical and playful move, we thus title this book After the Internet with the intention of inspiring fellow scholars, activists, and the public to think of what our world may look like outside of its existing attachment to the internet “as is.” To think “after the internet” (with a lower-case “i”) is to stay mindful of the ideological baggage with which the internet is so often entangled.
We are concerned with how the political, economic, and ideological visions of the internet are controlled by Western corporate giants such as Google, Facebook, and Microsoft. These corporations not only increasingly dominate our software, hardware, and online practices, but they also increasingly control the “back end” by which user data is stored or communicated. This book thus examines existing critical theories, practices, and case studies to imagine a democratic internet where human rights, diversity, and social justice are respected and empowered.
Is the Internet Shit?
The internet is shit today. It's broken. It was probably always broken, but it's worse than ever.
(Sunde 2015)
These words, uttered by Peter Sunde, free software activist and one of the founders of the Pirate Bay sharing platform, speak to a negativity voiced by those concerned with the control of the internet by corporate and governmental institutions. Decades after the invention of the laptop, described by Bill Gates as “the most empowering tool we've ever created” (Grossman 2004), many critics have lamented how the internet has become intertwined with an economic system of neoliberal globalization marked by the “speeding up of time and shrinking of space” (Harvey 1990: 241).
We recognize ample scholarship that has problematized numerous social, economic, political, and cultural issues in relation to today's internet, all importantly noting that it is not the “internet” that should be the aim of such critique but the social, economic, and political forces that drive its deployment and application.
Concerns have surfaced around a number of core political and economic issues in relation to the internet. Across this book's chapters we share academic and journalistic research and analysis that relate the internet to surveillance, economic development, activism, and cultural diversity. We discuss research around surveillance that reveals that the internet is no longer a space for decentralized communication but instead capitalized upon by those who can best manage and manipulate digital infrastructures. It also begs the question as to why many no longer feel safe with public forms of digital expression without fear of persecution. We also share research focused on how the digital divide is a conceptually obsolete theme. Numerous studies have begun to show that blind access to technology does not in itself combat marginalization. Indeed, the myth of the internet as making people equal across the world and overcoming geographical inequality has been rebutted by sobering realities that show how digital economies bring disproportionate wealth to the limited few (Hargittai & Hsieh 2013). Further, we share research around technology and activism that reveals that the passive political use of social media, sometimes referred to as “slacktivism,” is neither necessary nor sufficient to drive the waves of social movements that have taken hold of our world since late 2010. Finally, we also share research that has debunked the myth of the internet as a solution to the world's increased loss of bio-, linguistic, and cultural diversity. We argue that one cannot collect or preserve diversity merely by placing information online, nor can one ignore the environmentally damaging infrastructures that underpin digital communications, such as the electrical grid, the undersea fiber-optic cable system, or the industrial factory systems that assemble and produce network technologies as well as house our data.
We elaborate further on each of these major themes below.
Surveillance and Freedom
Perhaps the most publicly visible concern associated with the internet today relates to surveillance. It has raised fears that we have entered a “post-privacy” world without our consent. Not only is personal privacy of concern, but so also is our faith in acting publicly without fear of repression or repercussion. The revelations associated with the National Security Agency's (NSA) PRISM project, made public by whistleblower Edward Snowden, are staggering. Not only have major technology corporations been found to be complicit with state surveillance in a post-9/11 world, but we have also learned how data that technology users assumed to be private have instead fueled surveillance and control. When President Barack Obama attempted to defend this effort, with an argument that the NSA gathered metadata rather than data, it reflected a clear attempt to obfuscate how powerful such forms of harvesting really are (Mayer 2013). When corporations and states can control and monitor where, when, and how technology is used, they can deem users as targets to be monitored and thereby circumvent habeas corpus.
WikiLeaks editor Julian Assange has made the point that both Google and the NSA are in the same business of collecting all information. While one organization sells this information to advertisers and the other monitors it for suspicious behavior, the goal for both is the same, to “collect it all,” as one of the NSA's leaked documents makes abundantly clear (Greenwald 2014: 97). Such control of information allows states and corporations in partnership to “discipline” their citizens.
Science and technology scholar Laura DeNardis (2012) notes the role of the internet in creating this new form of disciplining, through what she terms “internet governance.” DeNardis describes three key elements that have given rise to these dynamics: (1) the digital sphere as a place of political action; (2) the deployment of technology to negotiate terms of content control; and (3) the control of content through the use of private, hidden, and proprietary intermediaries. Her work demonstrates “how the technical arrangements of Internet governance inherently embed social and economic interests and, furthermore, how these arrangements can be co-opted to enact social control and content governance” (DeNardis 2012: 734).
Karine Nahon's (2014) work continues on this thread, exposing the substantial increase in state and self-regulation of the internet and posing the question of whether all mediation might eventually represent a form of opaque censorship, far removed from the gaze of distant users. Nahon discusses the power of the mediators in networked information, and the increased role of regulation in relation to that power.
The surveillance “issue” seems to have become a point of concern among technology users worldwide, and speaks to what philosophers Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari have derisively described as “State philosophy,” or social formations and epistemologies that support the hierarchical and representational systems owned and managed by those in power (Massumi 1987: xi).
Recent battles over net neutrality worldwide expose the increasing consolidation of power of elite voices in driving the internet. This has brought into being what Parminder Singh (2010) terms “internet malls,” or systems where preferential access is structured to make select powerful corporations more visible. While Singh discusses these issues mostly in relation to the disparity of resources to be offered in a pay-scale-run internet versus a free public internet, the implications go beyond the issue of resources to practices of how data is preserved, aggregated, and used. This is consistent with the perspective raised by Finn Brunton and Helen Nissenbaum (2013), who describe the need to prioritize and protect vulnerable non-control-holding internet users. They discuss the possibility of communally and locally developing data obfuscation tools and the potential that these tools hold to influence increasingly decentralized and autonomous internet use that escapes the dangers posed by surveillance regimes and sharing economies. At stake is a world where users have little to no power over the data they are consistently providing to “big data” repositories, which in turn can support both corporate and state power at the cost of citizen rights and freedoms.
Sharing Economy
In addition, we can also see how internet-centric communitarian language masks an economic system where the rich get richer. Today, far and wide, we hear the term “sharing economy” in relation to the internet. Yet what we hear less of is who actually benefits from that sharing. We see examples where any technology that monetizes user input is often treated as “sharing,” with little critical scrutiny into how that technology functions or its associated political economies. While the term has circulated to frame internet economies as supportive of lateral or equal trade, consistent with early visions of the internet as supportive of a “gift economy,” there is plenty of research that reveals macro-economic effects that generate economic inequality.
Indeed, critics argue that within many of the major sharing platforms today, such as AirBnB and Uber, the gifting appears to only go in one direction: from technology users to the owners of the platforms and those they serve. Decentralized uses of new technology were supposed to shape the world into a participatory culture (Jenkins et al. 2005), and we do at times see examples of this. But when another Silicon Valley company is purchased or makes an initial public offering on the stock exchange leading to the investment of billions of dollars in these companies, none of these funds are shared with the individual users whose “digital labor” built value for these companies (Fish & Srinivasan 2012). Several social media companies could thus be viewed as exploitative: aggregating labor without compensation, avoiding taxes through offshore accounts, avoiding unionization and the payment for laborer benefits, and migrating into new domains of industry (Fuchs 2015). And the result of this may shape disastrous macro-economic outcomes. For example, Instagram, with 13 employees, sold for $100 million in the same month within which Kodak, with tens of thousands of employees, went bankrupt (Ulanoff 2012).
If such is the pattern of the sharing economy, then where will the safeguards lie for fair, protected, and well-compensated working- and middle-class labor? These questions characterize the ethical and practical challenges that face media industries as they navigate the boundaries between creativity and capitalization, security and independence, and individualization and loose-knit “social” media collectivity (Deuze 2007). Digital labor may be the new “killer app” for these corporations, but do little to support social and economic justice.
Adam Fish (2015) discusses the double standards practiced by several internet corporations, accentuated as they spread the “opportunities” of providing access to the web across the globe through projects such as Facebook's internet-delivering drones. He claims that this establishes a pattern where technology-developing countries direct the internet's operation and growth, while offering it to others in substantially more commercialized and regulated forms. The internet is hardly open to these users, but instead constructed in the image of the access-providing corporation. Most troubling is the lack of intuitive ability to protest or undo the imbalance. We must ask: how does one protest against a Facebook internet-providing drone in the sky and out of our sight?
Fish notes that there is no process by which the elites that control technology can be easily stopped, and that indeed the current dynamic contributes to inequality in a number of arenas. For example, while a few musicians and video producers may use the internet to be discovered by millions, the vast majority of grassroots artists have been found to be even further distanced from the resources they need to sustain and succeed (Byrne 2013). A number of corporations that have productively used the scalability of the internet to create successful businesses have been purchased and incorporated into multinational and multiplatform media companies that in the process monopolize certain sectors of the internet (Patelis & Hatzopoulos 2013).
Such concerns around the privatized overtones of the internet relate to the early work of Saskia Sassen (1998) and later work by Karl Rethemeyer (2007) regarding the impact of such corporatization on the potential for decentralized and autonomous use of the internet. Sassen notes the changing architecture of the internet in influencing the emergence of “non-state-centered governance mechanisms” (1998: 545), which she argues have altered the meaning of territory, especially the transformation of the internet into “a contested space with considerable potential for segmentation and privatization. Perhaps the most important takeaway from her piece is the claim that “network power is not inherently distributive” (1998: 546).
Sassen points to the absence of excessive commercialization as the key factor in the internet's distributed nature, as we see even ostensibly participatory networks become increasingly more concentrated in power and resources. Rethemeyer (2007) discusses this increased concentration of commercialization and resources online in the context of government participation, concluding from a series of case studies that the internet is exacerbating the ongoing corporatization of state and federal government, silencing citizen voices and anti-hegemonic movements. The internet may be a decentralized network, but those who control the way information flows and is monetized are well equipped to exploit this architecture.
Neoliberalism in Action
Issues around technology and inequality shape not just poorer distant users of the global South but also the places and cultures where technology is produced. An example of such is the San Francisco Bay Area. This part of the world has long given birth to grassroots activist and social justice movements, from the anti-Vietnam war student protests to the Black Panther movement. It is also an important witness to the birth of the internet and the web, particularly via countercultural online communities dedicated to principles of environmentalism, economic equality, and the gift economy.
While various forms of activism focused on supporting the voiceless still exist within the Bay area region of Northern California, we note that the profitability of the internet industry can be tied to San Francisco's status as the most expensive city in the United States. It has become an increasingly visible flashpoint of gentrification in action, displacing immigrants, activists, and working-class laborers (Bort 2015). It is also a reminder that the effects of a supposedly ubiquitous infrastructure like the internet are material. The internet shapes and is shaped by people and places.
Critics point out that today's internet must be seen in relation to neoliberal policies and economics, which is increasingly seen as a desirable positive given the absence of more progressive or fundamentally democratic political choices: for example, the United States election between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump or the “Brexit” issue regarding the United Kingdom leaving the European Union. Neoliberalism can be viewed as the outgrowth of increasingly close relationships forged between states and private corporations, as evidenced by increased deregulation (Martinez & Garcia 2000). As an intertwined set of economic and political systems, its effects have increasingly delegated public spaces and services to private corporations.
Our public spaces online are often managed and manipulated by for-profit corporations such as Facebook or Google, whose parent holding company is called Alphabet, Inc. Critics argue that such a neoliberal system supports the mirage of freedom while working to manipulate economic, political, and informational transactions. Yet we also know that “free” trade agreements such as NAFTA, a poster child of neoliberalism, have functioned to displace indigenous peoples, and galvanized the rise of indigenous-led social movements such as those of the Zapatistas of Mexico, who have fought against the privatization of their lands and lives (Cleaver 1998).
Within spaces of power and privilege in the United States, the collusion between major internet apostles and the US government is barely veiled, though largely left undiscussed by the popular media. Jared Cohen, a former State Department and current Google employee, has recently written a book with Eric Schmidt, chairman of Alphabet (and former CEO of Google), extolling the power of Western tools to “solve problems” (Cohen & Schmidt 2013), while failing to discuss that these tools are private and proprietary and that their use ultimately serves Google's bottom line. “Problems,” from their perspective, represent a way of framing social or public conversations that are consensus-based or radically democratic. In another example, Megan Smith, a former manager at Google, became President Obama's Chief Technology Officer (Scola 2014). While many progressive activists decry the revolving door between Wall Street and the US government, few scrutinize a similar pattern in relation to Silicon Valley. Indeed, Silicon Valley is often treated as an unmitigated good, which is dangerous given its incredible economic and social power. The connections between technology corporations and the state must thus be unpacked rather than merely taken for granted.
