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Google Archipelago: The Digital Gulag and the Simulation of Freedom Paperback – September 30, 2019
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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 Archipelagobegins 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.
- Print length216 pages
- LanguageEnglish
- PublisherNew English Review Press
- Publication dateSeptember 30, 2019
- Dimensions5.5 x 0.49 x 8.5 inches
- ISBN-101943003262
- ISBN-13978-1943003266
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Editorial Reviews
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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
About the Author
Michael was a Professor of Liberal Studies and Global Liberal Studies at NYU from 2008 to 2019. He also taught at Duke University, North Carolina Central University, Carnegie Mellon University, and Case Western Reserve University. His scholarly and academic essays have appeared in The Quarterly Journal of Austrian Economics, Academic Questions, Endeavour, The British Journal for the History of Science, College Composition and Communication, International Philosophical Quarterly, the De Gruyter anthologies Organized Secularism in the United States and Global Secularisms in a Post-Secular Age, and the Cambridge University Press anthology George Eliot in Context, among others (see the Academic Scholarship page). He holds a Ph.D. in Literary and Cultural Studies from Carnegie Mellon University, a Master's in English Literature from Case Western Reserve University, and a B.A. in English Literature from the University of Pittsburgh.
Michael has appeared on major network political talk shows: Tucker Carlson Tonight, Fox & Friends, Fox & Friends First, Varney & Company, The Ingraham Angle, Unfiltered with Dan Bongino, and The Glenn Beck Show, among others.
Product details
- Publisher : New English Review Press (September 30, 2019)
- Language : English
- Paperback : 216 pages
- ISBN-10 : 1943003262
- ISBN-13 : 978-1943003266
- Item Weight : 9.9 ounces
- Dimensions : 5.5 x 0.49 x 8.5 inches
- Best Sellers Rank: #307,671 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #366 in Communism & Socialism (Books)
- #376 in Censorship & Politics
- #388 in Computer History & Culture (Books)
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About the author

Dr. Michael Rectenwald is the author of twelve books, including The Great Reset and the Struggle for Liberty: Unraveling the Global Agenda (Jan. 2023); Thought Criminal (Dec. 2020); Beyond Woke (May 2020); Google Archipelago: The Digital Gulag and the Simulation of Freedom (Sept. 2019); Springtime for Snowflakes: “Social Justice” and Its Postmodern Parentage (an academic’s memoir, 2018); Nineteenth-Century British Secularism: Science, Religion and Literature (2016); Academic Writing, Real World Topics (2015, Concise Edition 2016); Global Secularisms in a Post-Secular Age (2015); Breach (Collected Poems, 2013); The Thief and Other Stories (2013); and The Eros of the Baby-Boom Eras (1991).
Michael was a Professor of Liberal Studies and Global Liberal Studies at NYU from 2008 to 2019. He also taught at Duke University, North Carolina Central University, Carnegie Mellon University, and Case Western Reserve University. His scholarly and academic essays have appeared in The Quarterly Journal of Austrian Economics, Academic Questions, Endeavour, The British Journal for the History of Science, College Composition and Communication, International Philosophical Quarterly, the De Gruyter anthologies Organized Secularism in the United States and Global Secularisms in a Post-Secular Age, and the Cambridge University Press anthology George Eliot in Context, among others (see the Academic Scholarship page). He holds a Ph.D. in Literary and Cultural Studies from Carnegie Mellon University, a Master's in English Literature from Case Western Reserve University, and a B.A. in English Literature from the University of Pittsburgh.
Michael’s writing for general audiences has appeared on The Mises Institute Wire, The Epoch Times, RT.com, Campus Reform, The New English Review, The International Business Times, The American Conservative, Quillette, The Washington Post, The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, LotusEaters.com, Chronicles Magazine, and others.
Michael has appeared on major network political talk shows (Tucker Carlson Tonight, Fox & Friends, Fox & Friends First, Varney & Company, The Ingraham Angle, Unfiltered with Dan Bongino, The Glenn Beck Show), on syndicated radio shows (Coast to Coast AM, Glenn Beck, The Larry Elder Show, and many others), on The Epoch Times’ American Thought Leaders series, and on numerous podcasts (The Tom Woods Show, The Leighton Smith Podcast, Steel-on-Steel, The Carl Jackson Podcast, and many others). (See “Interviews” on the Media page.)
Professor Michael Rectenwald has spoken to audiences large and small in many venues: The New York Metropolitan Republican Club (five talks); The Mises Institute (The Austrian Economics Research Conference Ludwig von Mises Memorial Lecture, The Libertarian Scholars Conference Opening Lecture, the Ron Paul Symposium); The NYU Republican Club; the New York Ex-Liberals Group; Baylor University’s Hankamer School of Business; The Leadership Institute (several talks); Turning Point USA (several talks); Grove City College; Hillsdale College (several lectures); Regent University; The Austrian Student Scholars Conference Ludwig von Mises Memorial Lecture; The Mises Caucus of the Libertarian Party (two talks); The Common Sense Society; The Conservative Opportunity Society (a U.S. Congressional caucus); the Republican Spouses Club; the Conservatives and Libertarians at Microsoft (CLAMS) group; American Freedom Alliance; Liberty Speaks; and others. Please write to Michael@MichaelRectenwald.com for fees and availability.
A former Marxist, Professor Rectenwald is a champion of liberty and opposes all forms of totalitarianism and political authoritarianism, including socialism-communism, “social justice,” fascism, political correctness, and “woke” ideology.
Michael's website is MichaelRectenwald.com.
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He discusses different components of what we now know as the "Great Reset", for example, "Woke Capitalism". He has intimate experience with it as this "Cancel Culture" ran him out of NYU. He correctly makes an analogy to Solzhenitsyn's "Gulag Archipelago" by symbolically choosing Google to describe the Digital Gulag or Google Archipelago. Once in place, the global digital gulag will achieve total surveillance and control and be able to lock non-conformists out of many aspects of daily life, including those required to sustain an existence.
He details how even a century ago many monopoly capitalists were actually socialist utopians and that their ultimate goals are one-worldism or a one-world monopoly. He uses the example of the founder of Gillette razors in 1902, who went on to describe his desire for a "world corporation".
He uses the term Google Marxism to describe the merger of corporate monopoly capitalism and socialism, which will be the ideology and social structure of the future because "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."
You definitely must add Google Archipelago to your bookshelf!
Having envisioned the future in this short, non-fiction work, retired academic Rectenwald believes technology—Big Tech—is fashioning a digital gulag similar in its zeal for conformity and repression as the brutal 20th Century Soviet model.
Big Tech is defined as mega-data services, media, cable, internet services, social media platforms, Artificial Intelligence, bots and the apps that dot our phones like chicken pox. Given the homogenized political and social nature of Big Tech, the author describes a grim time ahead for those out of favor with their norms.
In the West, deplatforming, brigading, social shaming, ostracism are taking the place of work camps, firing squads and torture. (Though the current Chinese template of cyber control in the form of social scores backed by prison camps and forced organ harvesting seems an unappealing hybrid.)
There are a few sections where I lost the narrative thread, but the author's overall message of society's absorption into the Google blorg is not hard to believe and easily observable in action.
Readers interested in tech trajectories and their effect on freedom of speech, among other menaced freedoms, should find this a suitable companion.
As you can see today, they empower online mob culture and provide the means to destroy people’s lives who do not conform to mainstream thought. They make non-persons and non-facts of them. These companies act governmentally, but its subjects do not have rights and no alternatives once their lives are turned upside down. There’s a good book which explains all this called Google Archipelago by Michael Rectenwald. It’s a topical, ideological, political, and governmental cognate of Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago for the digital sphere.
What Big Tech is doing is truly pernicious. They are becoming dictatorial as time goes on as they select and control information. Nobody who is unaccountable to the public should have this power to shape our thoughts and culture.









