Researchers at Princeton and Northwestern universities have pored over 1,800
US policies and concluded that America is an oligarchy. Instead of looking
out for the majority of the country’s citizens, the US government is ruled
by the interests of the rich and the powerful, they found. No great
surprises there, then.
US policies and concluded that America is an oligarchy. Instead of looking
out for the majority of the country’s citizens, the US government is ruled
by the interests of the rich and the powerful, they found. No great
surprises there, then.
But the government is not the only American power whose motivations need to be
rigourously examined. Some 2,400 miles away from Washington, in Silicon
Valley, Google is aggressively gaining power with little to keep it in check.
It has cosied up to governments around the world so effectively that its
chairman, Eric Schmidt, is a White House advisor. In Britain, its executives
meet with ministers more than almost any other corporation.
Google can’t be blamed for this: one of its jobs is to lobby for laws that
benefit its shareholders, but it is up to governments to push back. As
things stand, Google – and to a lesser extent, Facebook – are in danger of
becoming the architects of the law.
Meanwhile, these companies are becoming ever more sophisticated about the
amount of information they access about users. Google scans our emails. It
knows where we are. It anticipates what we want before we even know it. Sure
there are privacy settings and all that, but surrendering to Google also
feels nigh on impossible to avoid if you want to live in the 21st century.
It doesn’t stop there either. If Google Glass is widely adopted, it will be
able to clock everything we see, while the advance of Google Wallet could
position the company at the heart of much of the world’s spending.
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