The WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange carved a reputation as a firebrand and intense critic of the modern tech companies after rising to fame following the WikiLeaks disclosures. Although he’s been absent from the public eye in recent years, he frequently commented on the emerging trends in the technology landscape.
“If you want a vision of the future, imagine Washington-backed Google Glasses strapped onto vacant human faces — forever”
Big Brother is watching you
Paraphrasing a famous line from George Orwell’s ‘Nineteen Eighty-Four’, Assange used Google‘s failed smart glasses as a rhetorical device to critique their philosophy in an op-ed for The New York Times.
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In his column, he was critiquing a new book titled ‘The New Digital Age’ by Google’s then-executive chairman Eric Schmidt and businessman Jared Cohen, who was then director of Google Ideas.
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This book outlined Google’s vision for how the world was changing and laid out the company’s role in reshaping it. But, to Assange, it was a bland and uninspired account of how this company was implementing George Orwell’s prophecy without even really understanding how.
Drawing from the original line, Assange’s disdain for the company is as clear as day in the way that he compared people wearing Google Glass to “a boot stamping on a human face”.
Don’t be evil
The modern form of this Orwellian vision is centered around consumer technology, Assange believed, and gadgets like the Google Glass were akin to tools that would serve to sap users’ independence and privacy.
Although Google Glass itself was a failure, the point is more about the fears that this device represented. Now, more than a decade on, developments have more or less vindicated his dystopian perspectives – with a growing perception that a mass surveillance state is being precipitated by the surrender of privacy.
Some may argue this is a feature inherent to the use of consumer devices as well as software and services, and present in modern trends such as doomscrolling.
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