Google Archipelago by Michael Rectenwald

New English Review Press is happy to announce the publication of our thirtieth book, Google Archipelago: The Digital Gulag and the Simulation of Freedom by Michael Rectenwald.

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 Archipelago begins 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.

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