Google Marxism: Internet Ideology & the Governmentalization of Private Enterprise

Presented as the opening lecture of the Libertarian Scholars Conference hosted by the Mises Institute. 30 September 2019.

“Big Digital” consists of an array of business, political, and social interests, an ensemble of technology companies and Internet services, including but not limited to the Big Four: Alphabet (Google, YouTube, etc.) Amazon, Apple, and Facebook. Big Digital wields enormous economic and political power, presiding over Big Data, and serving as the chief arbiter of expression, with the power to effect the digital deletion of “dangerous” persons from its various platforms, as the gulag was the means to physically disappear dissidents and other thought criminals from “normal” life in the Soviet Union.[1]

In my new book, Google Archipelago, I recall the gulag archipelago of Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s literary masterpiece, while referring to a singular system of interconnected digital producers or “islands.” In suggesting a compar­ison between Google and the Gulag, each with its own set of archipelagos, I don’t mean to suggest that Google, an emblem for the digital giants of Big Data, and the Gulag, a massive pris­on system of the Soviet Union, can be understood as equally punitive or horrific. One was a vast network of arbitrary, brutal, elaborate, and tortuous penal camps “and special settlements…turned into an organized system of terror and exploitation of forced labor.”[2] The other is a vast constellation of digital giants with enormous economic and governmental power, but no physical torture, incarceration, forced labor, or immediate pros­pects of facing a firing squad. 

Yet, I certainly do mean to draw an analogy. As the Gulag Archipelago had once represented the most developed set of technological apparatuses for disciplinary and governmental power and control in the world, so the Google Archipelago rep­resents the contemporary equivalent of these capacities, only considerably less corporeal in character to date, yet immeasur­ably magnified, diversified, and extended in scope.

The principals of what I call Big Digital—the purveyors of mega-data services, media, cable, and internet services, social media plat­forms, Artificial Intelligence (AI) agents, apps, and the develop­ing Internet of Things (or Things of the Internet, as I describe the relation in what follows) are not only monopolies or would-be monopolies but also will either continue to be incorporated by the state, or become elements of a new corporate state power. 

Even if only augmentations of existing state power, the ap­paratuses of Big Digital combine to produce the Google Ar­chipelago, which stands to effect such an enormous sea change in governmental and economic power—inclusive of greatly enhanced and extended capabilities for supervision, surveil­lance, recording, tracking, facial-recognition, robot-swarming, monitoring, corralling, social-scoring, trammeling, punishing, ostracizing, un-personing or otherwise controlling populations to such an extent—that the non-corporal-punishment aspect of the Google Archipelago will come to be recognized as much less significant than its total political impact.  

In particular, the Google Archipelago is guided by a left authoritarianism. The significance of this corporate leftist authoritarianism will soon be made clear.

Given this characterization of the Google Archipelago, which is supported by evidence provided in my book, non-academics with a fervid or even modest interest in the phenomenon of Big Digital would find the academic digital media scholarship as akin to the scholasticism of monks quibbling about minor points of theology during the Inquisition. As for me, I knew the literature fairly well when I set out to write Google Archipelago, having taught digital media for fifteen years. The academic digital media scholars, whom I call “the digitalistas,” are so blinkered by Marxist and “post-Marxist” approaches that they miss the most salient feature of the field they study—namely, its sharp and dangerous turn toward authoritarian leftism. This is an unfortunate circumstance because the problem with the Internet is leftist authoritarianism, of which Marxism is the main variety. 

While one can find nary an academic article treating the blatant double standard of Big Digital in favor of leftists and liberal-leftists, the digitalistas jockey for position to proffer the most novel and anti-capitalist interpretations of the digital sphere. Scholars must find surreptitious surplus value extraction under every digital rock. The denizens of the Internet, or “netizens,” are treated as “super-exploited” non-working workers within a system of “digital capitalism.” The digitalistas descry a super-exploitive and pernicious “digital capitalism,” almost exclusively aiming to offer the best leftist explanation of the field. The greatest crime as the digitalistas see it involves facilitating and extending “neoliberalism” via the extraction of “free labor” from unwary netizens. 

The digitalistas and other leftists see so-called “neoliberalism” as a kind of stealth campaign underwritten by anti-statist economists whose aim has always been the transfer of public goods and services into private hands, preferably at bargain-basement prices. As public services—like schools, fire departments, the police department, and the highway system—the tragedy of digital spaces is their commodification, a further sign of that the capitalist order is asymptotically approaching the libertarian’s dream, and the socialist’s nightmare, of complete privatization. 

Drawing on Alvin Toffler’s notion of the “prosumer,” a hybrid producer-consumer who supposedly labors, without pay, while consuming, the digitalistas bemoan the transformation of the digital commons into a digital labor camp. As they see it, web searching amounts to exploited labor; the digital giants extract surplus value from the hapless web surfer, who mistakenly thought that he, she, or ze was having a good time, only to have his, her, or zir search histories sold. Of course, the validity of the labor theory of value (LTV) on which “exploitation” rests is mostly unexamined in these studies. If it is scrutinized, the LTV is only amiss where the digital realm is concerned, and a new basis for exploitation, such as “affective investments,” is found.

According to the digitalistas, when users open Facebook accounts, the “dumb fucks,” as Mark Zucker­berg once referred to his subscribers,[3] freely divulge valuable demographic information that Facebook then sells as data to advertisers. As such, they are exploited. When they post status updates or comment on the statuses of others, Facebook users produce, without pay, the content that Facebook sells to advertisers, which means they are exploited again. When conducting web searches, the hapless and unwitting unwaged slave laborers of digital capitalism pro­duce data that Google sells to advertisers jockeying for ranking position—exploitation![4] With almost every online activity, “[a] form of labor exploitation therefore occurs, albeit one based on voluntary and noncoerced acts of labor.”[5] Or, as my favorite horror storyteller of the left, Michel Foucault puts it, albeit in the context of internalized surveillance, the unpaid digital la­borer “becomes the principle of his own subjection.”[6]

If you think that my characterization of digitalista Marxism is exaggerated, have a peek at an essay entitled “Capitalism, Pa­triarchy, Slavery, and Racism in the Age of Digital Capitalism and Digital Labour,” by the Marxiest of all digitalistas, Christian Fuchs. In his essay, Fuchs draws parallels—although admitting differences—between four forms of unpaid labor, three of which are “productive”—meaning that they produce commodities for sale on the market. These include housework, reproductive la­bor, slavery, and posting on Facebook. The following two pas­sages are by no means ripped out of context, and therefore my quotations do not “enact violence upon the text” (nor, I should hope, on the reader): 

Slave-labour, reproductive labour and unpaid Facebook la­bour have in common that they are unwaged, but by being integrated into capitalist society nonetheless they create sur­plus-value.[7]

Whereas the wage-worker has a contractual and legally en­forceable right to be paid a wage for the performed labour, slaves, houseworkers and Facebook workers do not have such a right, which enables their exploitation as unpaid workers.[8]

Mind you, by “Facebook workers,” Fuchs means anyone who uses Facebook. That includes me, for one.

The capture of data as a result of the “labor” of web surfers is hardly the horror show that the digitalistas make out to be. I’ve known dozens if not hundreds of Marxists who regularly spent ten to twelve hours a day complaining on Facebook about their exploitation as part of the working class. If their Facebook statuses contributed to the environment for ad sales, this hardly strikes reasonable people as a matter of grave concern. On the other hand, if the Google Archipelago does involve a partial privatization of state functions, then the most troubling aspect is not the smaller size of the state or the loss of state services but the flip side—the governmentalization of private enterprise. As an appendage of the state, if not, in fact, acting as surrogate for it, the Google Archipelago also involves the expansion and magnification of state power. The digital constellation increases the state’s capacity for surveillance, information control, censorship, and the banishment or un-personing of personae non gratae.

Since leftist ideology is dominant in academia and the Internet, academic and other leftists cannot see the leftist authoritarianism in their object of study, any more than they can see it in their very midst. Their ideology is as invisible to them as the air they breathe, and thus they are unaware of its function. So, I remind them of what the French structuralist Marxist Louis Althusser argued in “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses”—captives of ideology are never able to recognize their own ideological convictions as ideological. The dominant ideology is as invisible to believers as the air they breathe: 

…what thus seems to take place outside ideology (to be precise, in the street), in reality takes place in ideology. What really takes place in ideology seems therefore to take place outside it. That is why those who are in ideology believe themselves by definition outside ideology …ideology never says, ‘I am ideological’.[9] 

This allows the ideology to exert its power. If they were able to recognize their own perspective as ideological, they would thereby elude ideology. But since the victims of authoritarianism are their political enemies, the digitalistas appear to be unconcerned, as the Google Archipelago hastens the disappearance of places to exercise the right of free speech. Ironically, the disappearance of so-called “public space” was once a major concern of academic leftist media scholars. Even the phrase used to describe public space, “the commons,” is a political, leftist metaphor that in the early days of the Internet was bandied about as the utopian ideal. But under the spell of ideology, the digitalistas miss the main features of the digital zeitgeist. 

As such, the digitalistas pro­duce decoys, false criticisms, and simulated radical critiques of the Google Archipelago. They substitute oppositional postur­ing and attempt to preclude other, more comprehensive expla­nations of the Google Archipelago. By suggesting that the problem is “capitalism”—which necessarily must be countered by some form of “social­ism”—the digitalistas aim to appear as the ultimate radicals. Meanwhile, their scholarship serves precisely to obscure the authoritarian leftism of the Google Archipelago. Contrary to their self-conceptions, the digitalistas are ideologues. They are ideological appendages of the system itself. They serve, rather than undermine, the digital empire.

But what is the relationship between their political ideology and the monopolistic objectives of the Google Archipelago? And why is it important that the political ideology of the Google Archipelago is leftist and authoritarian? Finally, why do I call this political ideology Google Marxism? I address these questions next. 

The Making, Manipulation, and Diversion of Digital Hive Minds

Much has been made of Google’s historical ties to U.S. intelligence community (IC) and military research agencies. In the 1990s, the IC saw the Internet as an unprecedented source for harvesting actionable intelligence, while military research agencies recognized its potential for new data-driven warfare systems.[10]With only their human-based methods, the IC could not approach let alone make sense of the mass of data the generated on the Internet. 

Cultivating the information age from its infancy, the IC and military agencies invested in university research and entrepreneurial innovation to achieve their ends. Faced with an otherwise unintelligible dross of data, they farmed-out the information gathering and analysis of intelligence work, and the information warfare aspects of military strategy, to the advanced developers of information systems in and around Stanford and the wider Silicon Valley.

The Manhattan Project, satellite technology, the aeronautics industry, and the Internet were earlier examples of such collaborations. In fact, as David Shumway points out, although “[m]any people think that the dependence of the university on government and private support for research emerged only in the wake of World War II and the Cold War, … the dependence on external research funding began in earnest during World War I.”[11] Yet prospects for Internet surveillance certainly foments distrust.[12] The Joint Enterprise Defense Initiative (JEDI) will prove no less collaborative.[13]

Ironically, those most likely to protest collaboration between state, corporate, and research institutions—namely, leftists—have been rendered inert by Big Digital, which agglomerates and folds them into complicit and politically quiescent collectives. Big Digital has wooed and won over an otherwise obstreperous and oppositional political contingent by massifying and encouraging their group-self-conscious identification and constantly reflecting their values back to them. As if by Pavlovian conditioning, when leftists participate in a collective, they associate their participation with activism. Big Digital deceives the left into believing that it is engaging in activism, precisely as it plays the part of enthusiastic and unwitting shill for the agenda of the corporate, globalist, monopolist corporation. Jaron Lanier’s term, “Digital Maoism,” points to the resemblance be­tween Maoist Cultural Revolutionary collectivism and the com­bined effects of digitalization and contemporary collectivism. But the leftism of the Google Archipelago is not only carried by humanoid leftists; it is functionally embed­ded within a whole spectrum of applications and features—in­cluding the structure of the Internet as such, the cloud, search engine algorithms, search result stacking software, web naviga­tion tracking software, and many other applications. If or when leftist bias is not directly embedded in the software, it is super­imposed by humanoid agents. And the sentinels of surveillance and control that populate social media sites, while not technol­ogies or bots per se, may as well be; they act as predictably as any technology. 

Collectivism is so central to leftism that I have sometimes wondered whether it represents the true end, rather than merely the means, of leftist politics. That is, rather than a means for applying mass political pressure to achieve particular goals, what if collectivism itself is the ultimate goal? If the true goal of leftism is collectivism, then collectivism may be an adaptive function developed for the protection of individuals who feel overpowered by dominant opponents. 

The left derides anything standoffish or singular. Even Jaron Lanier’s reference to a singular “hive mind” drew the ire of critics, who insisted that there are many and sundry hive minds.[14] But Lanier’s point was not that there can be only one hive mind but rather that all hive minds, regardless of their differences, share the same set of hive-mind traits. The primary trait of the hive mind is group-self-consciousness. “We don’t have to think, therefore we are right” is the collectivist equivalent of Cartesian self-affirmation.

As The People Who Know Everything, Google and YouTube must have a good reason for their exclusive policing of “rightwing extremism.” It is likely one of its many tactics for building a massified constituency. YouTube’s blogs and policies about eliminating “hate speech,” for example, practically equate all hate speech with expressions of “supremacy.”[15] While this may suggest a blissful ignorance of history—that four times as many innocent people have been killed in the name of “equality” than in the name of “supremacy”—one shouldn’t discount the digital giants’ omniscience. Certainly, the YouTube and Google hive mind knows.

But how is such asymmetry rationalized? What is the tacit explanation? Rightist ideology is policed because it is deemed “problematic” (politically and thus morally evil). Leftist ideology, on the other hand, is given a free pass because it obviously poses no danger. YouTube and other Big Digital principals represent leftism—to themselves and their constituencies—as the default no-fault political belief system. While the crimes of right-wing political villainy are kept in circulation and regularly denounced, the left’s political crimes, despite its much larger number of victims, are swept under the carpet, ignored, or justified. YouTube regards leftist ideology not merely as obviously benign but also naturally beneficial. The moral probity of leftism is taken for granted. Leftists are on “the right side of history,” even though their historical crimes are unparalleled. 

What is accomplished by such whitewashing of leftism? In addition to producing and cementing its digital hive-minded collectives, by disappearing leftist criminality, Big Digital eludes criticism of its own authoritarian leftism. As I showed in a paper delivered at the Mises Institute in March,[16] just as the founder of the Gillette Razor Company, King Camp Gillette, couched his megalomania and dictatorial ambitions in a rhetoric of equality and altruism, so Big Digital’s leftism has provided a mantle of virtue, transparent to some, to mask its dictatorial practices. As such, the principals of Big Digital have managed to divert attention and deflect criticism from their global monopolist and governmental ambitions.

Corporate Leftism

To benefit global capitalist, particularly monopolistic corporations, a political creed would likely promote the free movement of labor and goods across national borders and thus would be internationalist rather than nationalist or nativist. It might seek to produce and promote new niche markets and thus it would benefit from a politics that encourages the continual splintering of identity categories. Such splintering would also prevent or disrupt the collective bargaining of organized labor. The global capitalist corporation might benefit from the creation of utterly new identity types, and thus benefit from gender pluralism, transgenderism, and other identity morphisms. The disruption of stable gender categories will eventually dismantle the family, the last bastion of influence other than the state and major monopolistic powers. Ultimately, the global monopolistic corporation would benefit from a singular globalized monopoly of government with one set of rules, and thus would promote internationalism, otherwise known as global government or one-worldism. Meanwhile, contemporary leftism aims at the dissolution of heretofore stable social ontologies, such as gender identities, the family, social hierarchies, historical memory, inherited culture, Christianity, and the nation state. It aims at a one-world monopoly of government. Thus, the politics that most closely aligns with the worldwide, global interests of monopolistic corporations is contemporary leftwing politics. The corporate adoption of leftist politics may be called “corporate leftism.”[17]

Like “woke capitalism,” corporate leftism—the leftism of corporations—will strike readers as an oxymoron. Leftism may seem entirely incompatible with corporate capitalism, especially given their historical relationship. Yet, the evidence of the corporate embrace and promotion of contemporary leftism, both past and present, is extensive.

Corporate leftism is a major feature of Big Digital. It is deeply embedded in the ethos and technologies of Big Digi­tal, and has been for decades. Although Big Digital began as a sideshow, it has since taken centerstage and now presides over public and private life to such an extent that it rivals, if it doesn’t surpass, the reach and apparent penetration of many govern­ments combined. Big Digital effectively operates as what postmodern theorist Michel Foucault called a “gov­ernmentality,” a means of governing the conduct of populations but also the technologies of governance and the rationality that underpins the technologies.[18] In the broadest sense, Big Digital is concerned with the collection and control of information, personal expression and its containment, and “privacy.” But the governmentality of Big Digital also includes the “directing, constraining and framing [of] online behaviours.”[19]

As such, Big Digital may be a means by which the oversight and control functions that formerly were the province of national governments have been delegated to the market.[20] These governmental functions include not only commercial, cultural, corporate-political, and economic power but also the capability to shape the political field itself, or the bounded ter­rain that circumscribes what is allowable or possible and ex­cludes what is not.[21] Big Digital sets the boundaries of acceptable discourse in digital spaces, allowing some positions and precluding others.

Although Big Digital does use censorship and bias to achieve governmental ends, the constraints are also technolog­ical and the technology itself is intrinsically political. Political ideology is not merely a subsidiary feature of Big Digital. Ide­ology is coded into its very DNA, which is replicated in every organizational offshoot and new technology. Big Digital’s ideol­ogy circulates through the deep neural networks of cyberspace and other digital spheres. It is intrinsic to the foundations of the Internet, the cloud, algorithms,[22] apps, AI bots, social me­dia services, web navigation tracking software systems, virtual assistants, and more. Google’s beliefs and objectives regarding knowledge, as George Gilder argues, are political to the core:    

The Google theory of knowledge and mind are not mere ab­stract exercises. They dictate Google’s business model, which has progressed from “search” to “satisfy.” Google’s path to riches, for which it can show considerable evidence, is that with enough data and enough processors it can know bet­ter than we do what will satisfy our longings… If the path to knowledge is the infinitely fast processing of all data, if the mind—that engine by which we pursue the truth of things—is simply a logic machine, then the combination of algorithm and data can produce one and only one result. Such a vision is not only deterministic but ultimately dictatorial.[23]

Not only is the model intrinsically political, it embodies a particular kind of politics. Its aim is the centralized collection and storage of all of the world’s data and its distribution through ­algorithms that steer users along particular paths. The Google system of centralized knowledge control resembles nothing as much as it does the centralized Soviet system of production and distribution, only digitalized and partially privatized. Moreover, the “actually-existing,” centralized, controlled and policed digital sphere of Big Digital has followed after a communalistic propaganda campaign, just as pre-Soviet socialist propaganda preceded the Soviet Union. As socialism-communism promised collective ownership and control of the means of production and distribution and ended in state monopolization of every sphere of life, the early Internet heralded an intellectual and cultural “commons,” open to all and controlled by none. In the case of the Internet, the transformation was not strictly from an “information superhighway” to a series of toll roads but more importantly, from a leftist utopian notion of a digital commons to a version of digital centralization that, while privately held, nevertheless functions like a state or, more accurately, an international private governmentality. Thus, to borrow and expand the meaning of George Gilder’s phrase, the structure of ownership and control that Google commands may be called “Google Marxism.”[24] Google Marxism, like “socialism with Chinese characteristics,” manifests as state-supported monopoly capitalism, and “actually-existing socialism” for everyone else.

Google Marxism

Considered strictly in terms of ideology, Google Marxism works by collectivizing or socializing the masses for production, while also sufficiently individualizing them for particularized consumption and types of solitary production or non-productive lives. Google Marxism is much more than an ideology, however. It is a socioeconomic and political system, and as such, it represents the emergent global and digital version of corporate socialism, which is best represented as “socialism with Chinese characteristics”—a slogan the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) adopted to maintain a pretense of socialism despite its embrace of markets. Google Marxism is a profit-making and governance system undertaken by, and in the service of, corporate monopolists. But the monopolized top is paralleled by “socialism on-the-ground”—not only an economic stasis of reduced expectations but also a “socialism in theory,” or the dominance of socialist ideology. In this respect, Google Marxism is simply a new instance of corporate socialism—but one that may continue to increasingly resemble China in terms of the denial of human rights and an overarching state of unfreedom.

Beyond its class-structural and sociopolitical character, in terms of its technological capabilities, Google Marxism in-the-making is unprecedented. Surely, it is tending toward central­ized ownership, control, and distribution of all (digitalized) things. Yet the social relations of production—who does what—and class relations—who owns and controls what—will not be nearly as conspicuous to the naked eye as the continuously revolutionizing modes of production. In terms of technology or modes of production, Google Marxism is a new-and-vastly-im­proved, up-and-coming version of corporate socialism. Google Marxism represents the first-ever possibility of a truly global economic system tending toward corporate socialism. Social­ism has always had global pretensions. Only Google Marxism is capable of creating it, albeit in corporate socialist form. Google Marxism is the first system with the sufficient flexibility, scal­ability, connectivity, and, with the release of 5-G, the speed to en­able the distance-defying, mass, and small-scale niche produc­tion and distribution possibilities to enable a truly globalized system. The necessary mode for eliminating the factors of time and distance and thus for a truly globalized system is digitization. All production will be converted into digital production. 3-D printing is presently the emblem of the digitization of produc­tion. But the new paradigm will not be limited to 3-D printing or the vaunted “smartification of everything,” The Internet of Things (IoT).

Such phrases and acronyms hardly capture the extent of the profound transformation that is underway. Contrasting Google Marxism with the digital utopianism of 1990s makes this clear. In “A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace,”[25] John Perry Barlow, anarchist, civil libertarian, and songwriter for the Grateful Dead, described cyberspace as a new promised land, a prelapsarian digital Eden. Cyberspace was supposed to be a digital commons that the individual could explore at will, enjoying freedom from the constraints of property, government, the body, the differential treatment of persons based on identity and class markers, and the obstacles of space and time. The Internet promised freedom, equality, autonomy, selective interconnectivity, personalized and individualized production, and peer-to-peer social and economic exchange.

Barlow envisioned and worked to create an Internet specially designed for individual expression and liberation. But Google Marxism does not begin with and design an Internet for the individual. Google Marxism begins with the Internet and makes individuals fit to inhabit it.

What about The Internet of Things? Under Google Marxism, all things are digitized and the place for everything digital is the Internet. As such, all things belong to the Internet. Google Marxism doesn’t create The Internet of Things but rather The Things of the Internet (ToI). Yet the coming Internet is not best represented as ToI, because Google Marxism digitizes things, that is, converts things into packets of data. Data is information and “information wants to be free”—that is, free in Barlow’s sense, self-determining, autonomous, not free as in cost-free. Google Marxism aims to free things, not to make things free. Google Marxism frees the things of the Internet by making the Internet ubiquitous, coextensive with the world at large. Thus, the best slogan for the Internet under Google Marxism is the Liberation of Things, or LoT. LoT can be understood as an inverse exodus. Rather than a people escaping a place of bondage, the place escapes itself. Rather than freeing individuals, the Internet is freed.

With Google Marxism and the production of the Google Archipelago, we will no longer “go online.” We will not seek “freedom” in cyberspace—as if we ever did. Instead, cyberspace will have been freed, released from its silicon gulag. A vast digital world “exists and [will be] everywhere about us!” but it won’t be “Heaven.”[26]  When information is freed—information about us, that is—it may imprison us. The Internet is not imprisoned, but it may become a prison, and once liberated, the world at large might become a digital gulag. 

Under Google Marxism, the universe may “wake up,” as futurist, inventor and now Google Director of Engineering Ray Kurzweil suggests. But the promised “singularity” won’t amount to the birth of God, as Kurzweil implies.[27] It will more likely come as a vast digital extension of the police force, or an open-air prison. After all, the liberated “things” of the Internet will be apps, AI bots, facial recognition software, virtual fences, digital leashes, and, perhaps, cyber death camps.

*    *   *

That was the second attempt at ending this paper, and it still ended on a dour note. So, let’s have some “Fun with Google.” Following are two Google searches and the top suggestions they yield. You may have heard of this search exer­cise, but consider it now in the context of the simulacra of the Google Archipelago. There, now I’ve gone and taken the fun out of it. But here is fun with Google, as far as it goes:    

`

[1] “Facebook Falsely Brands Non-Violent Users ‘Dangerous’ to Justify Un-Personing.” Breitbart News. 3 May 2019.

[2] Khlevniuk, Oleg V. The History of the Gulag: From Collectivization to the Great Terror. Stalin Digital Archive. New Haven: Yale University Press, p. 10. Stalin Digital Archive. Web. 1 Jun 2019.

[3] Vargas, Jose Antonio. “The Face of Facebook: Mark Zuckerberg Opens up.” The New Yorker, 13 Sept. 2010.        

[4] Fuchs, “Google Capitalism;” Mager, Astrid. “Defining Algorithmic Ideology: Using Ideology Critique to Scrutinize Corporate Search Engines.” TripleC: Communication, Capitalism & Critique. Open Access Journal for a Global Sustainable Information Society, vol. 12, no. 1, 2014, pp. 28–39.

[5] Roberts, John Michael. “Co-Creative Prosumer Labor, Financial Knowledge Capitalism, and Marxist Value Theory.” The Information Society, vol. 32, no. 1, 2015, pp. 28–39; p. 28.

[6] Foucault, Michel. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. Vintage Books, 1995, p. 203.

[7] Fuchs, Christian. “Capitalism, Patriarchy, Slavery, and Racism in the Age of Digital Capitalism and Digital Labour.” Critical Sociology, vol. 44, no. 4-5, 2017, pp. 677–702; p. 681.

[8] Ibid., p. 692.

[9] Althusser, Louis. “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses (Notes towards an Investigation).” Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses by Louis Althusser 1969-70, https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/althuss­er/1970/ideology.htm. (Retrieved 9 May 2019).

[10] Ahmed, Nafeez. “How the CIA Made Google - INSURGE Intelligence.” Medium, INSURGE Intelligence, 13 Nov. 2015, https://medium.com/insurge-intelligence/how-the-cia-made-google-e836451a959e; Nesbit, Jeff, and Jeff Nesbit. “Google's True Origin Partly Lies in CIA and NSA Research Grants for Mass Surveillance.” Quartz, Quartz, 8 Dec. 2017, https://qz.com/1145669/googles-true-origin-partly-lies-in-cia-and-nsa-research-grants-for-mass-surveillance/.

[11] Shumway, David. “The University, Neoliberalism, and the Humanities: A History.” Humanities, vol. 6, no. 4, 2017, pp. 83–92.

[12] Ibid; Ahmed, Nafeez. “How the CIA Made Google.”

[13] “[A] cloud computing platform that will eventually run much of the Pentagon’s digital infrastructure—from data storage to image analytics to the translation of intercepted phone calls.” Silverman, Jacob. “Tech's Military Dilemma.” The New Republic, 7 Aug. 2018, https://newrepublic.com/article/148870/techs-military-dilemma-silicon-valley.

[14] Tumlin, Markel, et al. “Collectivism vs. Individualism in a Wiki World: Librarians Respond to Jaron Laniers Essay ‘Digital Maoism: The Hazards of the New Online Collectivism.’” Serials Review, vol. 33, no. 1, 2007, pp. 45–53., doi:10.1080/00987913.2007.10765092.

[15] “Our Ongoing Work to Tackle Hate.” Official YouTube Blog, 5 June 2019, youtube.googleblog.com/2019/06/our-ongoing-work-to-tackle-hate.html.

[16] Rectenwald, Michael. “Libertarianism(s) versus Postmodernism and ‘Social Justice’ Ideology.” Ludwig von Mises Memorial Lecture. The Mises Institute. March 22, 2019, to be published in The Quarterly Journal of Austrian Economics. 

[17] The first and one of the few uses of the phrase “corporate leftism” appeared in a Time article that ironically referred to the corporate leftism of Coors Brewing Co. The corporate leftism of the notoriously conservative company is explained as a public relations response to “its bad reputation with minorities and unions [that] nearly devastated Coors in the early 1980s” as well as “‘changing expectations of a work force whose demograph­ics have changed…’” (Cloud, John. “Why Coors Went Soft.” Time, 21 Nov. 1998, p. 70.).

[18] Michel Foucault introduced the term “governmentality” in a series of lectures from 1977 to 1979. By the rationality underpinning technologies of governance, Foucault meant the way that power rationalizes the relations of power to itself and to the governed.

[19] The digital realm has been considered in terms of Foucault’s notion of a governmentality by Badouard, Romain, et al. “Beyond ‘Points of Control’: Logics of Digital Governmentality.” Internet Policy Review: Journal of Internet Regulation, vol. 5, no. 3, 30 Sept. 2016, pp. 1–13.

[20] Slaughter, Steven. “Extended Neo-Liberalism: Governing Without the State.” Liberty Beyond Neo-Liberalism, 2005, pp. 91–119.

[21] The term “political field,” defined by the French sociologist Pierre Bour­dieu, refers to a particular kind of social terrain: a bounded space of struggle over political power that is structured by rules of access, where resources are differentially distributed among players and the set of legitimate positions on questions of government is constrained—that is, some political positions are beyond the boundaries of legitimate discourse. (Mudge, Stephanie Lee. “THE STATE OF THE ART: What Is Neo-Liberalism?” Socio-Economic Review, vol. 6, 26 Aug. 2008, pp. 703–731. p. 707.)

[22] Mager, Astrid. “Defining Algorithmic Ideology: Using Ideology Critique to Scrutinize Corporate Search Engines.” TripleC: Communication, Capitalism & Critique. Open Access Journal for a Global Sustainable Information Society, vol. 12, no. 1, 2014, pp. 28–39.

[23] Gilder, George. Life After Google: The Fall of Big Data and the Rise of the Blockchain Economy. Gateway Editions. Emphasis mine.

[24] By “Google Marxism,” Gilder means that Google holds the same as­sumption that Marx held, that the contemporary mode of production is the ultimate mode and that likewise the only issues that remain to be solved are matters of distribution. (Gilder, George. Life after Google. Regnery

[25] Barlow, John Perry. “A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace.” Electronic Frontier Foundation, 8 Apr. 2018, www.eff.org/cyberspace-inde­pendence.

[26] Ginsberg, Allen. “America.” Howl and Other Poems. City Lights, 1956, p.18. The fragment is from section II of “Howl.” The full stanza reads: They broke their backs lifting Moloch to Heaven! Pavements, trees, radios, tons! lifting the city to Heaven which exists and is everywhere about us!

[27] Kurzweil, Ray. “The Six Epochs”. Academic Writing, Real World Topics, Michael Rectenwald and Lisa Carl, 1st ed., Broadview Press, Peterborough, Ont., 2015, p. 463, Accessed 3 June 2019.