Abstract
Glen Whelan’s new book on Alphabet/Google is an informative, insightful, and occasionally very funny account of one of the most successful and valuable corporations in the world. Alphabet’s story is one of profound intellectual achievement, cut-throat business practice, and delusional narcissism, directed by ambitions of almost unimaginable human folly.
Whelan’s analysis draws on an eclectic range of literature including social theory, history, philosophy, futurology, and science fiction, developing genuinely new concepts in order to better understand Alphabet and the broader social dynamics of which it is a part. The analysis revolves around two main concepts: the idea of that Alphabet is a “megacorporation,” and the ideology of “infinite times.” Whelan’s story begins by comparing Alphabet with the English East India Company, characterizing both as “megacorporations” due to their vast powers and the existential impact they have on people’s everyday lives. According to Whelan, a megacorporation possesses four main characteristics: monopoly power, corporate social responsibility, political-economic hybridity, and existential impacts. Both the English East India Company and Alphabet meet these four criteria but surprisingly he does not consider Amazon to be a megacorporation, arguing that it remains narrowly focused on developments in computing. This is debatable since Amazon’s business has clearly had profound effects on retailing across a range of industries and has been a pioneer of the gig economy, providing the platforms underpinning numerous industries including advertising, cloud, product, and lean platforms (Srniceck, 2016). The other main conceptual contribution of the book is the ideology of infinite times, “associated with the widespread concern to indefinitely extend humanity’s past and future at both the personal and social levels” (p. 4). The ideology of infinite times is transforming the character of human experience, where “. . .Alphabet is changing how we construct, experience and manage both that which is already past and that which is yet to be” (p. 14).
Origins
Whelan traces the emergence of Alphabet/Google to the “academic-industrial military complex” (p. 46) of Silicon Valley. PhD students Larry Page and Sergei Brin dropped out of Stanford after developing the Page Rank technology in 1996 and the Google search engine in 1997. In 1999 Google began to sell advertising and quickly revolutionized the digital advertising market. In the first quarter of 2019 the company made $46 billion. As Whelan puts it, “Google is an advertizer’s wet dream.” (p. 50). Despite its underlying business model, Google characterizes its own mission in grandiose terms as, “to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.” (Quoted in Whelan, p. 54). Building on its digital advertising revenues, Google rapidly diversified into a range of other businesses including YouTube, Google Maps, Google View, driverless cars, space exploration, military projects, artificial intelligence, venture capital, health care, and human longevity. Alphabet was founded in 2014 to act as a holding company for these diverse businesses.
By 2019 the two founders of Google were billionaires whose wealth placed them 10th and 14th on the Forbes billionaires list. Whelan notes that Stanford University itself made $337 million from the licensing agreement with Brin and Page’s companies although this agreement ended in 2011.
Monopoly power and politics
Whelan observes that Alphabet possesses vast political and economic power, devoting more financial resources to political lobbying than any other company in the US. It “often tries to crush its competitors,” maintaining its dominant position through its ability to manipulate access to information, and burying “the websites of its competitors” in its search engine results (p. 61). Although Whelan examines concerns about Google’s flexible and shifting political stance on censoring search results for the Chinese market, there is little discussion of the “new forms of intelligence gathering and industrial scale spying” (p. 66) Alphabet have enabled, nor the close parallels between surveillance by China’s authoritarian government and the US’s own system of mass surveillance which is both more technologically advanced and more global in its reach. Google’s cozy relationship with the US Department of Defense and US intelligence organizations has already been remarked upon by numerous commentators (Assange, 2014; Greenwald, 2014), but it receives relatively little attention in the book, which instead focuses on other important existential impacts such as the company’s vast economic power, and issues related to online self presentation, sustainability, and human immortality.
Experiments with subjectivity
Whelan’s analysis provides an insightful account of the subtle ways in which new technology and communications media are transforming subjectivity. This includes anonymity and the use of alter egos online to conceal our identities, as well as the management of users’ “personal dossier”—a shorthand term for all the electronic traces that companies use to record customers on and offline activities. As well as online fraud, where people have abused their anonymity to boost their own image and/or discredit others, Whelan analyses online impression management and shaming processes, highlighting concerns with online reputation management, legal debates about the right to be forgotten, and the emergence of firms like reputation.com, devoted to managing one’s “digital dossier.” Whelan’s analysis focuses on the everyday management of one’s digital dossier, and although he provides an insightful account of this, some analysis is needed of Google’s role in global mass surveillance and the “architecture of oppression” that has been revealed by Snowden (2019).
Archive fever
Instead of characterizing Alphabet’s amassing of our digital dossiers and other cultural artifacts as part of an emerging “architecture of oppression” (Snowden, 2019), Whelan describes this same project in terms of the construction of “humanity’s great library,” (p. 97) proposing two distinct approaches to this new archive: “massive history” and “melange history.” Influenced by Braudel’s approach, “massive history” is global in scope and focusses on the longue duree. Alphabet’s main innovation to this approach is quantitative. Rather than being based on qualitative case study research, “Massive historians. . . can apply it to huge data sets” (p. 105). Although our access to historical documents has increased dramatically, the actual the contribution of “massive history” to new techniques of analysis—Whelan focusses on Google Ngram here—are rather modest.
Drawing on Richard Rorty’s conception of contingency in the construction of ourselves, Whelan explains the second approach—melange history—as enabling “individuals and communities to construct historical self-knowledge and redirect futures” (p. 109). He provides numerous examples of this approach to history including new histories of colonialism which have revised our understanding of black history and the type of remix culture championed by Harvard lawyer Lawrence Lessig. Accordingly the construction of “humanity’s great library” by Google influences the way in which we understand our own past, enabling alternative histories to be built in a kind of bricolage.
Dreams of immortality and posthuman narcissism
Whelan’s book also provides a fascinating account of the “other bets” part of Alphabet, where huge sums of money are being thrown at some of humanity’s most pressing problems, at least as perceived by Brin and Page. A notable example is that of the medical research company, Calico, devoted to “our understanding of the biology that controls lifespan. . . [to] enable people to lead longer and healthier lives” (p. 57). Whelan’s extended and highly amusing discussion of immortality as one of the goals of Alphabet locates it in the narcissistic delusions of Silicon Valley entrepreneurs in general. He describes a number of diverging perspectives emerging from Silicon Valley’s apparent obsession with immortality: those that envisage living forever in a virtual state with their minds uploaded to a computer, those that want to live forever in their “material substrate” or “meatsack” through cloning or medical therapy, and those who prefer a natural death due to religious convictions or the sheer boredom of living. Whelan observes that these narcissistic delusions are grossly elitist and inegalitarian in their conception, quoting Gill Scott Heron’s song Whitey On the Moon. He also reflects on other possible shortcomings of immortality, “Just think, that well established ‘colleague’ that so obviously dislikes you, and that you just know is forever making reject recommendations on your oh-so-well-thought-out-papers, might never retire.” (p. 120). One wealthy white middle-class man’s Silicon heaven is easily reconceived as being another’s infinite hell of petty politics with no exit. Whelan provides some balance to these reflections by observing that the super-wealthy elites who can afford their immortality may choose to devote their infinite lifespan to the cultivation of patience and the global human rights movement, but I suspect these observations were made with his tongue placed firmly in his cheek. He concludes this discussion with the comment that, “if Alphabet were to prove capable of delivering this ‘priceless’ gift, then the mega-corporation would have a devoted and lucrative customer base in perpetuity” (p. 129).
Sustainability of the megacorporation
The section on the sustainability of Alphabet addresses tensions between the company’s promise to facilitate greater autonomy and local governance, and its involvement with privacy violations, fake news filter bubbles, and relationships with authoritarian governments around the world. The discussion of the leaked company video “The Selfish Ledger” reveals the authoritarian tendencies of the company, showing employees discussing Google’s role in mass behavioral manipulation, ostensibly to solve the world’s problems. This is followed by a discussion of Google’s interest in space exploration and colonization, highlighting the authoritarian aspects of governance necessitated in projects operating in hostile conditions. Whelan observes that “Alphabet can be seen to be pushing future societies away from autonomy” (p. 146). Toward the end of the book Whelan speculates about the role of Alphabet’s projects in contributing to “the emergence of some sort of wholesale social collapse” (p. 166). Here Whelan follows closely in the footsteps of other social theorists who have investigated the systemic risks associated with modern technology such as Ulrich Beck, Charles Perrow, and Paul Virilio, and their ideas about the emergence of increasingly globalized accidents.
Limitations
Nonetheless, this is an insightful, generous spirited and fascinating account of the rise of the megacorporation and the ideology of “living in infinite times.” This book deserves to be widely read and would be a valuable resource to scholars and students in fields as diverse as business ethics, entrepreneurship, business strategy, surveillance studies, and critical social theory. It provides a detailed overview of Alphabet’s rise to power and the way it is changing the way we work and live.
