Julian Assange is a lot of things to a lot of people. Traitor. Hero. Visionary. Megalomaniac. Gentleman. Asshole.
He’s a cipher; a tabula rasa onto which anyone with a perspective and/or an axe to grind can project their hopes, fears, and particular worldview.
He’s also really good at reviewing books.
“THE New Digital Age” 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.
…
The book proselytizes the role of technology in reshaping the world’s people and nations into likenesses of the world’s dominant superpower, whether they want to be reshaped or not.
Wouldn’t it be something if China ends up being the last bastion of freedom in a world gone Google? For now, that notion is little more than a fever dream in the minds of some of our more senior literary figures, oft as not writing in the throes of late-stage Brain Eater Syndrome, but our grandchildren may look to the East, as the people of Russia and Eastern Europe once looked west, and long for whatever they have over there.