Shop top categories that ship internationally
Your audiobook is waiting!
Enjoy a free trial on us
$0.00
  • One credit a month to pick any title from our entire premium selection to keep (you’ll use your first credit now).
  • Unlimited listening on select audiobooks, Audible Originals, and podcasts.
  • You will get an email reminder before your trial ends.
  • $14.95 a month after 30 days. Cancel online anytime.
Sold and delivered by Audible, an Amazon company
List Price: $14.95
By completing your purchase, you agree to Audible’s Conditions Of Use. and Amazon's Privacy Notice. Taxes where applicable.
Sold and delivered by Audible, an Amazon company
Added to

Sorry, there was a problem.

There was an error retrieving your Wish Lists. Please try again.

Sorry, there was a problem.

List unavailable.

Google Archipelago: The Digital Gulag and the Simulation of Freedom Audible Audiobook – Unabridged

4.5 4.5 out of 5 stars 268 ratings

Google Archipelago: The Digital Gulag and the Simulation of Freedom explores the reach, penetration, power, and impact of Big Digital or the mega-information managers, social media platforms, Artificial Intelligence developers, providers of other web applications and functionalities, and the architects and proponents of the promised Internet of Things. Alphabet (Google, YouTube, etc.) Facebook and Instagram, Twitter, Yelp, and LinkedIn, as well as their many subsidiaries and competitors, comprise a digital collective Big Digital whose domain is global and whose ideological and functional power represents a force unlike any other in history.

Big Digital, a non-governmental constellation of digital technology corporations, now presides over public and private life to such an extent that it rivals, if not surpassing, the governmental reach and penetration of many national governments, combined. Big Digital represents a new private form of government, or a governmentality, the means by which populations are governed, and the technologies that enable that governance. But the constraints of the political field superintended by Big Digital include more than censorship and bias. Constraints are structurally determined by the technology.

The primary means behind Big Digital's governmental functions is ideology. And the ideology of Big Digital is decidedly leftist. I call Big Digital's ideology corporate leftism, or to borrow from and redefine a phrase coined by George Gilder, "Google Marxism". Corporate leftism comprises the set of values and beliefs now lodged within a growing number of US and other corporations. Corporate leftism informs the policies, politics, and procedures of Big Digital.

But corporate leftism is also disseminated well beyond the work cultures of Big Digital's corporate headquarters and regional sites. Corporate leftism is not a subsidiary feature or incidental aspect of Big Digital. Leftism is coded into the very DNA of Big Digital technology and replicated with every organizational offshoot and new technology. Big Digital's leftist ideology circulates through the deep neural networks of cyberspace and other digital spheres. Corporate leftism is intrinsic to the structure of the Internet, the cloud, algorithms, apps, AI bots, social media services, web navigation tracking software systems, virtual assistants, and more.

Google Archipelago tells the story of how Silicon Valley's digital technology corporations became bastions of leftism how, why, and to what ends corporate leftism constituted and informed Big Digital, while still promoting the commercial objectives of its digital global conglomerates and extending their reach as a private governmentality. Big Digital's corporate leftism is authoritarian to the core and the leading governmentality in today's world is the corporate leftist authoritarianism that I call the Google Archipelago.

$0.99/month for the first 3 months
For a limited time, save 90% on Audible. Get this deal

Product details

Listening Length 4 hours and 56 minutes
Author Michael Rectenwald
Narrator William Williams
Audible.com Release Date November 21, 2019
Publisher New English Review Press
Program Type Audiobook
Version Unabridged
Language English
ASIN B081S4KDQ9
Best Sellers Rank #207,455 in Audible Books & Originals (See Top 100 in Audible Books & Originals)
#47 in Censorship (Audible Books & Originals)
#400 in Human-Computer Interaction (Books)
#852 in Censorship & Politics

Customer reviews

4.5 out of 5 stars
268 global ratings

Review this product

Share your thoughts with other customers

Customers say

Customers find the book engaging and informative. They appreciate the well-researched content and honest analysis that enlightens and inspires them.

AI-generated from the text of customer reviews

Select to learn more
13 customers mention "Readability"13 positive0 negative

Customers find the book engaging and thought-provoking. They describe it as a must-read for everyone on the internet. However, some readers mention issues with the binding coming undone and pages falling out.

"...The author exposes the growing digital gulag in a very readable and creative manner...." Read more

"...There’s a good book which explains all this called Google Archipelago by Michael Rectenwald...." Read more

"...The book is interesting when the author addresses Google's policing of search results and anticipates similar policing in smart cities and other..." Read more

"Great read...IF you can get your HANDS on one...PAT Rawley" Read more

10 customers mention "Enlightened content"10 positive0 negative

Customers find the book's content informative, well-researched, and thought-provoking. They appreciate the real analysis and sound thesis supported by facts. The messages are consistent and plausible.

"...His messages are consistent and highly plausible...." Read more

"...His approach and vantage point is unique and you will obtain new insights you won't get from other excellent authors who also cover technocracy...." Read more

"...The book is well researched and fully documented with footnotes...." Read more

"...That said, the thesis is sound, namely that Google specifically and Big Tech generally are our new censorial and Chinese-esque overlords...." Read more

"NEW" book condition, subpar
4 out of 5 stars
"NEW" book condition, subpar
I am still getting into reading this, I am 100% sure the book will be a great and it will laminating read. My problem is the condition of the book. New book, however, the binding is coming undone and pages falling out. Distributed by Amazon
Thank you for your feedback
Sorry, there was an error
Sorry we couldn't load the review

Top reviews from the United States

  • Reviewed in the United States on October 16, 2019
    I'll admit at the outset that the subject matter is rather more academic and professorial than is my usual preference. That said, I bought this book because I have seen the author interviewed numerous times on various programs and podcasts. His messages are consistent and highly plausible. While Prof Rectenwald writes for other academics, he is crystal clear in his interviews about the dangers of manipulation of information by biased Big Digital and Big Media. And, we don't simply have to just take his word for it. The evidence of search engine bias, especially Google (I avoid Google for this reason), is as plain as the political bias of the main stream media. Both have chosen Leftism despite a hundred years of Communist failures. It is both stunning and sobering that tech and media industrialists who have made their wealth in Capitalism actively work toward its decline. The attitude appears to be "I got mine, screw you." There are times when "conspiracy theories" become "conspiracy facts", as we have learned about the Russia Hoax. The chief contribution of Google Archipelago for the non-academic is that a courageous man who refused to be intimidated by the Marxist professoriate has sounded the alarm that the cancer of Leftism is spreading.
    48 people found this helpful
    Report
  • Reviewed in the United States on June 1, 2021
    Recovering Marxist turned Libertarian Dr. Rectenwald takes on the task of attempting to make clearer the nature of the totalitarian technocracy that is being built around us and in all nations of the world. His approach and vantage point is unique and you will obtain new insights you won't get from other excellent authors who also cover technocracy.

    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!
    10 people found this helpful
    Report
  • Reviewed in the United States on August 9, 2020
    "The Google Archipelago has emerged and will expand, effectively becoming conterminous with the full range of human activity, enveloping every social space where people may be found."

    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.
    12 people found this helpful
    Report
  • Reviewed in the United States on November 25, 2019
    I can’t recommend this book enough. The author exposes the growing digital gulag in a very readable and creative manner. You will be fascinated at how big digital is in bed with the social justice movement. The book is well researched and fully documented with footnotes. As an enjoyable contrast, two fictional chapters provide some short side trips into an imaginative scenario. Dr. Rectenwald concludes with the need for a metaphysical basis for truth to counteract the present snd coming digital deception. Buy several copies and give them to your friends!
    5 people found this helpful
    Report
  • Reviewed in the United States on June 5, 2020
    I’m currently disillusioned with the Valley and Big Tech. I think Big Tech represents a leftist authoritarianism which provides appendages for state control of populations with the ultimate goal of creating a corporate state.

    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.
    3 people found this helpful
    Report

Top reviews from other countries

Translate all reviews to English
  • Rani Sharma
    5.0 out of 5 stars Short, easy read, informative
    Reviewed in the United Kingdom on January 16, 2023
    Compact, easy to read, easy to understand. Packed with essential information. Bravo!
  • Anthoine B.
    5.0 out of 5 stars Recomendable
    Reviewed in Spain on February 22, 2020
    Recomendable