{"id":5171,"date":"2013-06-01T12:24:15","date_gmt":"2013-06-01T18:24:15","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/?p=5171"},"modified":"2013-06-01T12:24:15","modified_gmt":"2013-06-01T18:24:15","slug":"the-banality-of-%e2%80%98don%e2%80%99t-be-evil%e2%80%99","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/?p=5171","title":{"rendered":"The Banality of \u2018Don\u2019t Be Evil\u2019"},"content":{"rendered":"

Julian Assange<\/a>: <\/p>\n

\u201cTHE New Digital Age<\/a>\u201d is a startlingly clear and provocative blueprint for technocratic imperialism, from two of its leading witch doctors, Eric Schmidt and Jared Cohen, who construct a new idiom for United States global power in the 21st century. This idiom reflects the ever closer union between the State Department and Silicon Valley, as personified by Mr. Schmidt, the executive chairman of Google, and Mr. Cohen, a former adviser to Condoleezza Rice and Hillary Clinton who is now director of Google Ideas.<\/p>\n

The authors met in occupied Baghdad in 2009, when the book was conceived. Strolling among the ruins, the two became excited that consumer technology was transforming a society flattened by United States military occupation. They decided the tech industry could be a powerful agent of American foreign policy.<\/p>\n

The book proselytizes the role of technology in reshaping the world\u2019s people and nations into likenesses of the world\u2019s dominant superpower, whether they want to be reshaped or not. The prose is terse, the argument confident and the wisdom \u2014 banal. But this isn\u2019t a book designed to be read. It is a major declaration designed to foster alliances.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe New Digital Age\u201d is, beyond anything else, an attempt by Google to position itself as America\u2019s geopolitical visionary \u2014 the one company that can answer the question \u201cWhere should America go?\u201d It is not surprising that a respectable cast of the world\u2019s most famous warmongers has been trotted out to give its stamp of approval to this enticement to Western soft power. The acknowledgments give pride of place to Henry Kissinger, who along with Tony Blair and the former C.I.A. director Michael Hayden provided advance praise for the book.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Julian Assange: \u201cTHE New Digital Age\u201d is a startlingly clear and provocative blueprint for technocratic imperialism, from two of its leading witch doctors, Eric Schmidt and Jared Cohen, who construct a new idiom for United States global power in the 21st century. This idiom reflects the ever closer union between the State Department and Silicon […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5171"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=5171"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5171\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=5171"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=5171"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=5171"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}