Julian Assange makes a raft of good points in his New York Times Op-Ed piece about the globalizing effect of the Googleplex and its arrogant brand of technocracy. But because he’s the kind of exasperating person who sees the world only in extremes, Assange goes too far in painting the company as unmitigated autocratic evil. If you think we’re going to become the United States of Google, let’s recall that Microsoft was not too long similarly feared, and even without government intervention, it would have collapsed beneath its own weight because that’s usually what corporate behemoths do. And Google is nowhere near the tool of American governmental policy that Bell Labs was. You remember Bell Labs, right? It used to be a thing. An excerpt from Assange’s article, which is inspired by the book, The New Digital Age:

“The writing is on the wall, but the authors cannot see it. They borrow from William Dobson the idea that the media, in an autocracy, ‘allows for an opposition press as long as regime opponents understand where the unspoken limits are.’ But these trends are beginning to emerge in the United States. No one doubts the chilling effects of the investigations into The Associated Press and Fox’s James Rosen. But there has been little analysis of Google’s role in complying with the Rosen subpoena. I have personal experience of these trends.

The Department of Justice admitted in March that it was in its third year of a continuing criminal investigation of WikiLeaks. Court testimony states that its targets include ‘the founders, owners, or managers of WikiLeaks.’ One alleged source, Bradley Manning, faces a 12-week trial beginning tomorrow, with 24 prosecution witnesses expected to testify in secret.

This book is a balefully seminal work in which neither author has the language to see, much less to express, the titanic centralizing evil they are constructing. ‘What Lockheed Martin was to the 20th century,’ they tell us, ‘technology and cybersecurity companies will be to the 21st.’ Without even understanding how, they have updated and seamlessly implemented George Orwell’s prophecy. If you want a vision of the future, imagine Washington-backed Google Glasses strapped onto vacant human faces — forever. Zealots of the cult of consumer technology will find little to inspire them here, not that they ever seem to need it. But this is essential reading for anyone caught up in the struggle for the future, in view of one simple imperative: Know your enemy.“