 So my talk is Google Marxism, the Internet of Ideology, and the academics who perpetuate it. And I just want to make clear that I'm talking about, when I say capitalism here, I'm talking about dirty capitalism. A big digital consists of an array of political and social interests, an ensemble of technology companies and Internet services, but not limited to the Apple, Google, YouTube, Amazon, and Facebook. Big digital wields enormous economic political power presiding over big data and serving as the chief arbiter of expression with power to affect the digital and dangerous persons. This is big digital. These are the major corporations. With power to affect the digital deletion of dangerous persons from its various platforms, as the Google log was the means to physically disappear dissidents and other thought criminals from normal life in the Soviet Union. In my new book, The Google Archipelago, I recall the Google Archipelago of Alexandra Solzhenitsyn's literary masterpiece while referring to a singular system of interconnected digital producers or islands. In suggesting a comparison between Google and the Google log with its own set of archipelagos, I don't mean to say that Google is an emblem for the big digital giants of big digital and the Google log, 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 torturous penal camps and special settlements turned into an organized system of terror and exploitation and force of forced labor. 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 Google 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 corporal in character to date, yet immensely magnified, diversified and extended in scope. The principles of what I call big digital 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. If only augmentations of existing state power, the apparatuses of the big digital combined to produce the Google Archipelago, which stands to affect such an enormous sea change in governmental and economic power, inclusive of greatly enhanced and extended capacities for supervision, surveillance, recording, tracking, facial recognition, robot swarming, monitoring, corralling, social scoring, trampling, punishing, ostracizing, unpersoning 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 political impact. In particular, the Google Archipelago is guided by a left authoritarianism. The significance of this corporate left authoritarianism will soon be main clear. Given this characterization of the Google Archipelago, which is supported by evidence in my book, non-academics with a fervid or even modest interest in a 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 studies for 15 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 features 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 standards of big digital in favor of leftists or left liberals, the digital at least does jockey for position to proffer the most novel and anti-capitalist interpretations of the digital sphere. The denizens of the internet or netizens are treated as super exploited non-working workers within a system of digital capitalism. The digital at least does describe a super exploitive and pernicious digital capitalism almost exclusively aiming to offer the best leftist explanations of the field. The greatest crime as the digitalista see it involves the facilitating of neoliberalism via the extraction of quote free labor from unwary netizens. The digitalistas and other leftists see so-called neoliberalism as a kind of stealth campaign underwritten by anti-status economists like us, whose aim has 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 the digital spaces is their commodification, a further sign that the capitalist order is asymptotically approaching the libertarianist dream and the socialist nightmare of complete privatization. Drawing on Elvin Toffler's notion of the prosumer, a hybrid producer-consumer who supposedly labors without pay while consuming, the digitalistas bemoan the transformation of digital commons into a digital labor camp. As they see it, web surfing amounts to exploited labor. The digital giants extract surplus value from the hapless web surfer who mistakenly thought that he, she, or z, was having a good time, only had to have his, her, or sir search histories sold. Of course, the validity of the labor theory of value on which, quote, exploitation rests is mostly, if not entirely, unexamined in these studies. If it is scrutinized, the LTV is only a miss where the digital realm is concerned and a new basis for exploitation such as effective investments is found. According to the digitalistas, when users open Facebook accounts, Fs, as Mark Zuckerberg once referred to as subscribers, 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, with almost every form of online activity, quote, a form of labor exploitation therefore occurs, albeit one based on voluntary and non-coheurist acts of labor. Or, as my favorite horror storyteller of the left, Michelle Foucault puts it, albeit in the context of internalized surveillance, the unpaid digital laborer, quote, becomes the principle of his own subjection, end quote. If you think that my characterization of digitalist to Marxism is exaggerated, have a peek at an essay entitled Capitalism, Patriarchy, Slavery and Racism in the Age of Digital Capitalism and Digital Labor by the Marxist 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 they produce commodities for sale in the market. These include housework, reproductive labor, slavery, and posting on Facebook. The following passages are by no means ripped out of context, and therefore my quotations do not, quote, enact violence upon the text, nor should I hope on the reader. Slave labor, reproductive labor, and unpaid Facebook labor have in common that they are unwaged, but by being integrated into capitalist society, they nonetheless create surplus value. Whereas the wage worker has a contractual and legally enforceable right to be paid a wage for the performed labor, slaves, house workers, and Facebook workers do not have such a right, which enables their exploitation as unpaid workers. 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 surfaces hardly the horror show that the digitalist does make it out to be. I've known dozens, if not hundreds, of Marxists who regularly spent 10 to 12 hours a day complaining on Facebook about their exploitation as part of the working class. If their Facebook status has 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 a 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 banishment or unpersoning of persona non gratte. Since leftist ideology is dominant in academic... in academia and the internet, academic and other leftists cannot see the authoritarianism in their object of study any more that they can see it in their very midst. Their ideology that is in the university, their ideology as is 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-Lewith El-Souzer 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 seems to take place outside of ideology to be precise in the street in reality takes place in ideology. What really takes place in ideologies therefore seems to take place outside of it. That is why those who are in ideology believe themselves by definition outside of ideology. Ideology never says I am ideological. This allows 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 political enemies, the digital least has appeared 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 leftist academic media scholars. Even the phrase used to describe the space, public space, the commons, is a political leftist metaphor that in the early days of the internet was bandied about as the utopian ideal. To the spell of ideology, the digital least has missed the main features of this digital zeitgeist. At such, the digital least has produced 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 digital least is aimed to appear as the ultimate radicals. Meanwhile, their scholarship served precisely to obscure the authoritarian leftism of the Google Archipelago. Contrary to their self-conceptions, the digital least is our 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 their artistic 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 ideology Google Marxism? I address these questions in the next. The making, manipulation, and the diversion of digital hive minds. Much has been made of Google's historical ties and community 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. With only their human-based methods, the IC could not approach, let alone make sense of the mass data 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 intelligible dross of data, they farmed out the information gathering and analysis of intelligence works and the information warfare aspects of military strategy to the advanced developers of information systems in and around Stanford satellite technology, the aeronautics industry, and the internet were examples of such collaborations. In fact, as David Shumway points out, although many people think that the dependence of the university on the government and private support for research emerged only in the wake of World War II and the Cold War, the dependence on external funding began in earnest during World War I. Yet the prospects for internet surveillance and trust, the Joint Enterprise Defense Initiative, Jetty, will prove no less collaborative. Ironically, those most likely to protest the 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 this 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 Corporate Globalist and Monopolist Corporations. Jarron Launier's term digital Maoism points to the resemblance between the Maoist cultural revolutionary collectivism and the combined effects of digitalization and corporate contemporary collectivism. But the leftism of the Google Archipelago is not only carried out by humanoid leftists. It is functionally embedded within a whole spectrum of application and features, including the structure of the internet as such. The cloud, search engines, algorithms, search results, stacking software, web navigation tracking software and many other applications. If or when leftist biased is not indirectly embedded in the software, which it most most likely is, it is superimposed by humanoid agents. As the sentinels of surveillance control that populate social media sites, while not technologies are bought per se, the leftists may as well be as they act as predictably as any technology. And you know what I'm talking about, the Twitter mobs. Collectivism is so central to leftism that I have sometimes wonder whether it represents the true and rather than merely the true end, rather than merely the means of leftist politics. That is, rather than the means for applying mass political pressure to achieve political ends. 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 singular or off-standish. Even Geron Lanier's reference to a singular hive mind drew the ire of critics who insisted that there must be many and sundry hive minds. But Lanier's point was not that there can only be 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 the Cartesian self-affirmation. As the people who know everything Google and YouTube must have a good reason for their exclusive policing of right wing 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. While this may strike as a sign of blissful ignorance of history for example that four times as many innocent people have been killed in the name of quote unquote equality than in the name of supremacy one shouldn't discount the digital giant's 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 principles represent leftism to themselves and their constituencies as the default no fault political belief system. While the crimes of the political left despite its much larger numbers are swept under the carpet in order justified, YouTube regards leftist ideology not merely as obviously benign but 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 mind collectives by disappearing leftist criminality big digital eludes criticism of much of its own authoritarian leftism. As I showed in a paper delivered at the Mises Institute in March 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 principles of big digital have managed to divert attention and deflect criticism from their global corporatist and monopolist ambitions. Corporate leftism Just what is this? To benefit global capitalist particularly monopolistic corporations a political creed would likely promote the free movement of labour and goods across national borders and thus would be international rather than nationalist or nativist. We 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 labour. 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 global monopoly of government with one set of roles and thus would promote internationalism otherwise known as global government or one worldism. Meanwhile, contemporary leftism aims at the dissolution of here to force stable social ontologies such as gender identities, the family social hierarchies, historical memory inherited culture, Christianity the nation state. It aims at a one world monopoly of government. Thus the politics that most clearly aligns with the worldwide global interests of monopoly corporations is contemporary left wing politics. The corporate adoption of leftist politics may be called corporate leftism. Like woke capitalism corporate leftism the leftism of corporations will strike readers as an oxymoron or listeners. 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 side show it has now taken center stage and 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 Michelle Foucault called a governmentality. A means of governing the conduct of populations but also the technologies of governance and the rationality that underpins the such technologies. 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 concludes the directing constraining and framing of online behaviors. As such big digital may be a means by which the oversight and control functions that were formerly the province of national governments have been delegated to the market. These governmental functions include not only commercial, cultural, corporate political and economic power but also the capability to shape the political field itself. Where the bounded terrain that circumscribes what is allowable or possible and excludes what is not. Big digital sets the boundaries of acceptable discourse and digital spaces allowing some positions and precluding them. Although big digital does not use censorship and bias to achieve governmental ends, the constraints are also technological. Political ideology is coded into the very DNA of big digital 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 world. Google's beliefs and objectives regarding knowledge as George Gilder points out 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 what we have to do to satisfy our longings. If the path to knowledge is the infinitely fast processing of all data, if the mind, that engine 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. 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 in types of solitary production or nonproductive lives. Google Marxism is much more than an ideology however. It is a socio-economic and political system as such and as such it represents an emergent global and digital version of corporate socialism which is best represented as socialism with Chinese characteristics. A slogan the Chinese Communist Party adopted to maintain the 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 of reduce expectations but also a socialism in theory or the dominance of socialist ideology on the streets. In this respect, Google Marxism is simply a new instance of corporate socialism but one they may continue to increasingly resemble China in terms of its denial of human rights and an overarching state of unfreedom. But its class, structural and social political characteristics in terms of its technological capacities Google Marxism in the making is unprecedented. It is surely tending towards centralized ownership control and distribution of all digitalized things. Yet the social relations of production who does what and the class relations who owns and controls what will not be as nearly as conspicuous as to the naked eye as the continually revolutionizing modes of production. In terms of technology or modes of production Google Marxism is a new and vastly improved version of corporate socialism. It represents the first ever possibility of a truly global economic system tending towards 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 sufficient flexibility, scalability, connectivity and connectivity. And with the release of 5G the speed to enable the distance defying and mass 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. 3D printing is precisely the emblem of digitization of production and will not be limited to 3D printing or the vaunted smart of everything, the Internet of Things. Such phrases and acronyms hardly capture the extent of the profound transformation that is under way. Contrasting Google Marxism with digital utopianism of the 1990s makes this clear. In a declaration of the independence of cyberspace John Perry Barlow, anarchist, civil historian and songwriter for the Grateful Dead described cyberspace as a new promised land. A pre-lapsarian 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 connectivity, personalized and individual production and peer-to-peer social and economic exchange. Barlow envisioned and worked to create the 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 is the Internet. 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. Yet the coming Internet is not best represented by a TOI, Things of the Internet because Google Marxism digitizes things. It 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 and 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, co-extensive with the world at large. Thus the best slogan for the Internet under Google Marxism is the liberation of things or lot. Thanks a 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 the production of the Google Archipelago we will no longer go online. We will not seek freedom in cyberspace 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 as Alan Ginsburg glorified. But it won't be heaven. When information is freed information about us that is it may imprison information will be about us that is it may imprison us. The Internet is not imprisoned and once liberated the world at large might become a digital gulag. Under Google Marxism the universe may wake up as futurist and inventor now Google director of engineering Ray Kurzweil suggests but the promised singularity won't be amount to the birth of God as Kurzweil applies 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 offenses, digital leases and perhaps digital cyber camps. Digital death camps, sorry. That was the second attempt at ending this paper and it still ended on a dire note. So let's have some fun with Google shall we? Following our two 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. Therefore now I've gone and taken the fun out of it little boy. But here is fun with Google as far as it goes. So this is a search for men can. Men can have babies that's the first result men can cancer men can get pregnant men can have babies now etc. Women can fly cancer vote can do it canvas shoes and so on and so forth. Women candidates for president. So there's a there's a what they call algorithm fairness and it is really about reprogramming all the search results to affect the kind of results that they're looking for in the first place. Thank you.