Google Me: One-Click Democracy

Meaning Systems

by Barbara Cassin, Barbara Cassin

“Google is a champion of cultural democracy, but without culture and without democracy.” In this witty and polemical critique the philosopher Barbara Cassin takes aim at Google and our culture of big data. Enlisting her formidable knowledge of the rhetorical tradition, Cassin demolishes the Google myth of a “good” tech company and its “democracy of clicks,” laying bare the philosophical poverty and political naiveté that underwrites its founding slogans: “Organize the world’s information,” and “Don’t be evil.” For Cassin, this conjunction of globalizing knowledge and moral imperative is frighteningly similar to the way American demagogues justify their own universalizing mission before the world.

While sensitive to the possibilities of technology and to Google’s playful appeal, Cassin shows what is lost when a narrow worship of information becomes dogma, such that research comes to mean data mining and other languages become provincial “flavors” folded into an impoverished Globish, or global English.

184 pages, Kindle Edition

Published October 3, 2017

About the author

Barbara Cassin is a French philologist and philosopher. She was elected to the Académie française on 4 May 2018. Cassin is the recipient of the Grand Prize of Philosophy of the Académie française. She is an emeritus Research Director at the National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS) in Paris. Cassin is a program Director at the International College of Philosophy and the director of its Scientific Council and member of its board of directors. She was a director of Collège international de philosophie established by Jacques Derrida.

Reviews

[Ietrio · Rating 1 out of 5]

The hilarious take of an intellectual fraud. Cassin has probably a hard time setting up Gmail on a new computer, yet he can generate mysticism in amazing quantities. And yea, the title is cute, yet it only exacerbates the void which Cassin pretends to thread.

[Gino · Rating 5 out of 5]

El libro es interesante y aborda bien el como ha impactado Google en nuestras vidas, ya se analizaba el gran impacto de este motor de búsqueda desde 2006 y es muy interesante compararlo con lo que es hoy.

[María Eugenia · Rating 3 out of 5]

Alguna reflexión interesante tiene, pero...