Google Archipelago: The Digital Gulag and the Simulation of Freedom begins with familiar cultural politics as points of entry to the book’s theme regarding the reach, penetration, and soon the ubiquity of the digital world. In a book about enormous sea changes brought about by digital technology, Google Archipelago begins and ends with the political, in particular with the objectives of the Big Digital conglomerates as global corporate monopoly capitalists or would-be-monopolies.
Google Archipelago argues that Big Digital technologies and their principals represent not only economic powerhouses but also new forms of governmental power. The technologies of Big Digital not only amplify, extend, and lend precision to the powers of the state, they may represent elements of a new corporate state power.
In contrast to academics who study digital media and bemoan such supposed horrors as digital exploitation, in Google Archipelago, Michael Rectenwald argues that the real danger posed by Big Digital is not digital capitalism as such, but leftist authoritarianism, a political outlook shared by academic leftists, who thus cannot recognize it in their object of study. Thus, while imagining that they are radical critics of Big Digital, academic digital media scholars (whom Rectenwald terms the digitalistas ) actually serve as ideological smokescreens that obscure its real character.
Two chapters interrupt the book’s genre as non-fiction prose. Part historical science fiction and part memoir, these chapters render the story of a Soviet Gulag survivor and defector, and the author’s earlier digital self. Google Archipelago intentionally blurs the lines between argument and story, fact and artifact, the real and the imaginary. This is necessary, Rectenwald argues, because one cannot pretend to describe the Google Archipelago as if from without, as something apart from experience. In any case, soon one will no longer go on the Internet. The Internet and cyberspace will be everywhere, while humans and other agents will be digital artifacts within it.
The Google Archipelago represents the coextension of digitization and physical social space, the conversion of social space and its inhabitants into digital artifacts, and the potential to control populations to degrees unimagined by the likes of Stalin, Hitler, or Mao.
Review
When I read Springtime for Snowflakes and interviewed Michael Rectenwald, I recognized an extremely well-versed insider, a vital source confirming long-standing suspicions while deepening our understanding regarding the hijacking of American higher education by leftist indoctrination. An accomplishment in itself, Michael’s analysis has taken a quantum leap in Google Archipelago, tracing leftist ideology to almost all quarters of society, including corporate America and particularly Big Tech, the leading edge of wokeness. With meticulous sourcing and literary eloquence, Rectenwald makes a compelling case that Big Digital represents a leftist authoritarianism, providing appendages for state control of populations, if not representing the makings of a new corporate state itself. Here, Rectenwald establishes himself as an innovative and important public intellectual whose original insights we would ignore at our peril.
— Glenn Beck, political commentator, radio host and television producer
Professor Rectenwald’s insightful and illuminating book shows how and why Big Digital monopolies becomes ever more dictatorial as they select and control information and thus shape our thoughts and culture. The Google Archipelago exhibits blatant double standards, egregious bias, politically motivated designations of fake news, and tilted search engine algorithms, all manifestations of ingrained authoritarian leftism. While totalitarian Marxism failed as state organization, it has succeeded as the Google Archipelago which systematically imposes globalist, identity-politics, gender-pluralist, transgender, anti-toxic-masculinist, anti-cisgender, anti-family, anti-nativist, anti-conventionalist, and anti-traditionalist leftism, blocking people and ideas that do not conform, making non-persons and non-facts of them. The ever expanding Big Digital acts governmentally, but its subjects have no rights, and no alternatives. Rectenwald shows how we are being carried along to our fate as prisoners of Google Marxism, or totalitarian corporate socialism, which is arriving as a fait accompli with no votes from us and no means to dissent. Don t say you haven t been warned.
— Philip Carl Salzman, Emeritus Professor of Anthropology, McGill University
This book lives up to its provocative title, illustrating how “Google Marxism” not only tyrannizes over what we can say but even controls how we think and what we can know. In a theoretically-informed and meticulously-documented analysis, Rectenwald offers an unsettling vision of a totalitarian digital future.
— Janice Fiamengo, Professor of English, University of Ottawa, author of Sons of Feminism: Men Have Their Say–New English Review
About the Author
Michael Rectenwald is a recently retired Professor of Liberal Studies at New York University, where he taught cultural and social history as well as academic writing since 2008. He is the author of eight books, including Springtime for Snowflakes: ‘Social Justice’ and Its Postmodern Parentage (New English Review Press, 2018), Nineteenth-Century British Secularism: Science, Religion and Literature (Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), Academic Writing, Real World Topics (Broadview Press, 2015), and Global Secularisms in a Post-Secular Age (De Gruyter, 2015). Rectenwald is a prominent spokesperson for academic freedom and free speech and an expert on the history and character of the ‘social justice’ movement. He has published articles and essays on these topics in several periodicals and news outlets and has appeared regularly on national television networks, as well as on numerous radio and Internet shows.
