Tag Archives | Google

AI is creating a bonanza for tech companies and is being cast as a cleaner way to wage war, but the human cost is devastating.

Tech firms like Amazon and Google ‘have enormous responsibility’ for driving fossil fuel expansions, climate expert argues.

The paper’s author found that the five largest military contracts to major tech firms between 2018 and 2022 “had contract ceilings totaling at least $53 billion combined.”

As an extension of U.S. imperial power, U.S. tech corporations are eager to support Israeli atrocities.

Google provides an early, scary test case for mechanized suppression by threatening a popular economics site with demonetization.

What happens when killer robots start communicating with each other?

This accusation surfaced during the commencement of a historic trial, marking the most significant antitrust case in the U.S. in over twenty years.

Talk about the dangers of artificial intelligence, actual or imagined, has become feverish, much of it induced by the growing world of generative chat bots. When scrutinising the critics, attention should be paid to their motivations.

Once again we find ourselves in moments of economic crisis. As we battle through inflation and rounds of devaluation, thousands of workers around the world have lost their livelihoods. Yet amidst this all, we have seen workers across the globe go on strike and protest.

Twenty-five years of neoliberal political economy are to blame for today’s regime of surveillance advertising, and only public policy can undo it.

The recent reporting on the Uber Files—a series of 124,000 communications, dated from 2013 until 2017, that Mark McGann, one of Uber’s top lobbyists, leaked to The Guardian—has shed light on the company’s strategies to gain global prominence during its nascent years.

From the persecution and torture of journalist Julian Assange to mass censorship of independent media outlets by U.S. government contractors in Silicon Valley, Washington’s attacks on freedom of the press hurt every country and person on Earth.

Google–one of the largest and most influential organizations in the modern world–is filled with ex-CIA agents.

“We are anonymous because we fear retaliation.” This text was part of a letter signed by 500 Google employees last October, in which they decried their company’s direct support for the Israeli government and military.

Journalist Jonathan Cook has a new blog post out on his experience with being throttled into invisibility by Silicon Valley algorithmic suppression that will ring all too familiar for any online content creators who’ve been sufficiently critical of official western narratives over the last few years.

Recently, U.S. media have been aghast at legislation affecting China’s tech sector.

This is most clearly shown in what is allowed by the powers that run the financial system.

Facebook is under fire for (among other things) its involvement with Cambridge Analytica, a British data analytics firm funded by hedge fund billionaire and major Republican party donor Robert Mercer and formerly led by President Trump’s ex–campaign manager and strategist Steve Bannon. Cambridge Analytica harvested data from over 87 million Facebook profiles (up from Facebook’s original count of 50 million) without the users’ consent, according to a report by the London Observer (3/17/18) sourced to a whistleblower who worked at Cambridge Analytica until 2014.

The images below are from a lecture I gave to at SOAS, London University, on 18 October. This was part of a series organised by the SOAS Economics Department, and my lecture covered the forms taken by corporate power today, focusing on Apple, Google/Alphabet, Facebook, Amazon and Alibaba.

While Google’s Information Age dominance has long been recognized to have some unsavory consequences, the massive technology corporation has, in recent months, taken to directly censoring content and traffic to a variety of independent media outlets across the political spectrum — essentially muting the voices of any site or author who does not toe the establishment line.