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| Assange addresses supporters from the Ecuadorian Embassy |
I am in the process of reading the book reviewed below by David Zarley. When Google Met Wikileaks is an account of a meeting between Eric Schmidt, the Chairman of Google, and Julian Assange co-founder of Wikileaks. Assange is currently holed up in the Ecuadorian Embassy in London in order to avoid possible extradition to the US where some politicians have called for his execution on charges of treason. Assange, along with Edward Snowden in exile in Russia and Chelsea Manning, serving 35 years in a US prison for revealing US government activities to the US public are heroic figures to whom we owe a debt of gratitude.
I urge all who follow or read this blog to read Assange's account of the meeting with Schmidt and the conclusions he draws from it. You can purchase the book here.
Eric Schmidt and Jared Cohen also wrote a book The New Digital Age that Assange reviewed in the New York Times. The review is included in When Google Met Wikileaks. Those of us around this blog have had discussions on the nature of the rising tech bourgeois and the relationship between them and Silicon Valley in general and with the state what we might call military industrial complex. Like many socialists, anti-capitalists or any serious social activists, our resources and ability to peer in to the depths of this relationship and how it is part of a new era in the history of capitalism are limited. But it is something that demands attention. We are in interesting times. Assange's book confirms that we cannot ignore these developments or we do so at our peril. We reprint David Zarley's review from Paste Magazine. It is long but worth it. RM
When Google Met WikiLeaks by Julian
Assange Review
By B. David Zarley | November 11, 2014 | 2:29pm
Among the most powerful actors of the
Arab Spring—that brief, brilliant moment when revolution burst into glorious
life, the supposed petite mort, the delirious, wistful death for the
authoritarians and theocratics that had held down the region for so long?
Silicon Valley.
Ad hoc revolutionaries require communication platforms, unencumbered by government censure and impervious to silencing. The great genius set in the shadows of the Santa Cruz Mountains had provided them with myriad: Twitter, Facebook and other social networking sites sometimes carried as standards by renegade Internet providers rallied sympathizers and disseminated marching orders … then relayed results to an enthralled world.
According to Julian Assange—perhaps the
person most responsible for directly using the Internet and technology to shape
the body politic, via WikiLeaks—evidence of Silicon Valley’s interbred affair
with foreign policy began prior to the Arab Spring. Twitter seemed important
enough to the 2009 Iranian uprising that Jared Cohen, now director of Google
Ideas and then a member of the State Department, sent a missive to Twitter CEO
Jack Dorsey begging off any regular maintenance that might have hampered the
movement.
That Silicon Valley—and Google, Beast of
the Valley, in particular—would play a key role in geopolitics, even on a
pandemic scale, cannot be considered much of a surprise. For all the bluster
and misogyny, the easily mocked jejune awkwardness and sauntering, the
just-kissed-a-pretty-person peacocking that so grossly characterizes the
American tech sector, many of the technology merchants quite literally go about
changing the world. Google certainly ranks not least among them.
Simply behold figures the hunted Assange
rolls before us in an attempt to quantify Google’s brobdingnagian heft. As of
2013, the company’s “colorful, playful logo is imprinted on human retinas just
under six billion times each day, 2.1 trillion times per year.” These figures,
like the measurements of the universe or the geologic timeline, feel so immense
as to be practically incomprehensible, baffling by sheer scale alone. In a
moment in history when we often conflate visibility with power, Google
possesses, as Assange puts it, “an opportunity for respondent conditioning
enjoyed by no other company in history.”
In When Google Met WikiLeaks,
electric polemics and prophecies bookend a transcript of Assange’s interview
with Jared Cohen and with Google’s Executive Chairman Eric Schmidt. (This
interview makes up the bulk of the work.) What concerns Assange? Not so much
the catholic power and reach exerted by Google as what the company seeks.
In Assange’s view, wacky Google, “Don’t Be Evil” its most famous dictum, aims
to be a new kind of geopolitical actor: a boundless superstate, the
Invisible—yet extremely, immensely, impossibly visual!—Empire. Cohen and
Schmidt represent the heralds of a new age of technocratic hegemony.
For a dash of the Orwellian dramatic,
consider the term “technocratic imperialism.” Assange’s taxon first appeared in
his June 2013 New York Times review of the Schmidt/Cohen-penned,
treatise-cumpolicy papercum-bestseller The New Digital
Age. (From Assange’s review, in the interest of context: “… a startlingly
clear and provocative blueprint for technocratic imperialism, from two of its
leading witch doctors …”)
Assange really does not seem so far off, given a close read of When Google’s first chapter. It’s one of the two bookends that make Google v WikiLeaks worth a read. The transcript sandwiched between them enlightens in its own way, but Assange’s interjections and observations around this core give his book impetus.
One such observation comes in a
reprinting of the above-quoted Times review, a rather delightful and
slightly apocalyptic evisceration not only of the book’s premise, but of
Schmidt and Cohen. Assange wrote, “The New Digital Age is a balefully
seminal work in which neither author has the language to see, much less
express, the titanic centralizing evil they are constructing.”
Technophiles could easily see such claims
as extremist paranoiac ravings—titanic, centralizing evil! like Skynet!—but for
the hard evidence of Google’s geopolitical machinations. Cohen and Schmidt both
have long, deep ties with important people in Washington, with CVs tangled in a
myriad of NGO boards, with think-tank war tables.
Assange asks if we are so enamored with
the catechism echoing from the Googleplex as to have basically turned a blind
eye to its incestuous involvement with the National Security Administration,
brought to light with the PRISM leaks, wherein the NSA vacuumed Internet data
into its shadowed maw like a wobbegong shark, much of this from the Beast.
Assange openly laments the tragic irony of personal privacy advocates checking
their gmail whilst iPod polyps sit tucked into their ears.
Silicon Valley’s relationship with the NSA may be more than money and compliance kickbacks. Correspondence among Schmidt, Google’s Sergey Brin and NSA chief General Keith Alexander, as revealed in Jason Leopold’s Al Jazeera America reporting, provided evidence that the Beast of the Valley may be building infrastructure for military and intelligence communities.
Assange points to a seemingly throw-away line in Gen. Alexander and Brin’s emails. The general acknowledges Brin as a “key member of the Defense Industrial Base.” According to Assange, the Department of Homeland Security particularly defines the Defense Industrial Base as the industrial nexus by which “research and development, as well as design, production, delivery, and maintenance” of Title X (U.S. armed forces) components meet the stipulations of the U.S. military. This strongly implicates Brin, Schmidt, Cohen, et al. as crucial figures in the military-industrial complex.
Cold cash backs up this assertion. In
2012, Google streaked into the D.C. lobbyist stratosphere, outspending
perennial power players (and military/industrial blue chips) Lockheed Martin,
Boeing and Northrop Grumman. Google even surrendered its vaunted front page, the
very Internet’s front page, to the State Department’s Syria efforts, with a
live link to John Kerry answering questions on Hangout.
Schmidt and Cohen unequivocally believe that Silicon Valley will be the next great player in geopolitics. “What Lockheed Martin was to the twentieth century, technology and cyber-security companies will be to the twenty-first,” they wrote in The New Digital Age.
Perusing Google’s mergers and
acquisitions, we see recent buys like Meka Robotics and Boston Dynamics and
Titan Aerospace (which specializes in high-altitude UAVs, read: drones), plus
artificial intelligence/image recognition firm Jetpac. One can be forgiven for
assuming that perhaps Cohen and Schmidt had grievously misunderstood—and made
true—their own metaphor.
Assange sees less to fear in those overt
maneuvers, though, than what he sees as the Beast of the Valley’s tack-by-night
philosophy of budding superstatedom—the subtle positioning, beneath that
cheerful logo and puppy-like dogma, of Google as the United State’s sword and
shield in the brave new (un)wired world.
Assange’s fears may best be sussed out
from the transcript, which ends up being as much—if not more so—a philosophical
treatise as it is technological.
The interview, ostensibly for research for The New Digital Age, took place while Assange sat under house arrest at Ellingham Hall in Norfolk, England, in 2011. (Assange, then and now, is being hounded by the United States government, which seeks to try him for espionage over publishing the Chelsea Manning links, a bundle of diplomatic cables that included classified Army documents pertaining to operations in Iraq.)
At Ellingham Hall, over dinner and a garden perambulation—interrupted by rain—WikiLeaks met with Cohen and Schmidt. (Cohen’s resume aside, Schmidt also runs high and fast in the D.C. power corridors.) Assange also met, he realized later, a State Department shadow envoy. Lisa Shields, on hand to take notes during the interview, and Scott Malcomson, the Digital Age’s editor, have deep foreign relations ties.
In the interview, Schmidt—whom Assange
describes as having “a machinelike analyticity,” a genius of systems, if not
politics—often drills down into the guts. The Google chief opens the interview
by inquiring about the technical details of Tor, the anonymity-focused Internet
network. (Schmidt mispronounces the term as “Thor,” a slip Assange gleefully
pounces upon). Assange’s answers, shaped in part by having Cohen and Malcomson
at the table, tend to wander from the computer sciences department over to the
humanities.
We find some legitimately thrilling
explanations of how WikiLeaks and others in its forward-thinking web state—the
one destined to directly oppose, it seems, that of Google/the government—parry
attempts by various nations, law enforcement bodies, and extralegal corporate
retaliations. (This stuff, even with a modicum of understanding, truly,
inherently, interests a reader. We see into an exhilarating game of
cat-and-mouse, played paradoxically blind and in screaming plain sight/site, at
once.) The most the interview has to offer, besides the unfettered record, comes
in hints of the motivations of those in the interview.
WikiLeaks owns a somewhat polarizing reputation in the United States. Citizens perceive it either as a bold, whistleblowing topple-er of regimes, and bane of the powerful … or else a treasonous body that may cause irrevocable harm to the United States and its interests abroad. For readers leaning towards the latter but not yet over the precipice, Assange’s reasonings may serve some cold comfort.
Assange details for Cohen and Schmidt his
basic philosophy behind WikiLeaks: that a small amount of information can lead
to extraordinary changes in human beings. From this axiom, the WikiLeaks
mission becomes clear: Make available all relevant information. Unshackle
knowledge from censorship.
Assange maintains that public knowledge
only becomes detrimental for governments or organizations engaged in acts not
in the public good. Otherwise, why would unveiling cause concern? Assange
submits that the key weakness of bureaucratic behemoths is their reliance on (and
prodigious creation of) paper trails to operate. In short, a publication
platform like WikiLeaks takes advantage of this inherent flaw to inspire true
societal impetus.
Assange waves off the classic rebuttals, of dangers posed and lives put at risk, as a nefarious kind of doublespeak. WikiLeaks self-censures to ensure safety when needed. No American life has been lost due to the leaks. (Neither, of course, has Google’s good will—it seems just as, if not a touch more, curious.)
This is all rather heavy stuff, a bloody melange of geopolitics, technology, freedom, the emergence of corporate superstates, the very nature of knowledge revolution … topped with a dash of anti-utopian (for the Leaks-sympathetic set) futurism.
Assange, though his name may well be, at
this point, a synecdoche for cyber-terrorist, the 21st-century horror—comes off
in his own book as an eloquent, if not unbiased, guide. He turns out to be a
shockingly good author, particularly in light of some media stereotyping
suggesting a pallid oracle with the sphinx’s leash betwixt his teeth and a bald
eagle around his neck, his chemical eyes glowing in the night as government
adjules bay outside his window.
While far too erudite—and too diluted by the interview transcript—to be considered truly a clarion call, we may nonetheless eventually look back on When Google Met WikiLeaks as the first declaration of new digital war. We hear it here first, from a soft voice quietly speaking to the truths of Silicon Valley: Google is as capable of being evil—may already be evil—as any other company, body, or state.
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