Abstract
This chapter is a critical analysis of the discourse employed by powerful representatives of Google with respect to how they present ‘the future’ in their public statements, arguing that it has powerful ideological functions, serving to legitimate and naturalize their way of understanding the world. Ström locates these statements in relation to larger histories and practices of capitalist accumulation, imperial expansion, technological determinism, and techno-scientific utopianism in order to criticize Google’s narrow vision of the world-to-come. Their vision takes a privileged and sterilized present and imposes it on the great unknown in order to present a world scrubbed clean of uncertainty and alternatives, a world that the enormously powerful corporation is actively working to bring about.
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Ström, T.E. (2019). Into the Glorious Future: The Utopia of Cybernetic Capitalism According to Google’s Ideologues. In: Hudson, C., Wilson, E. (eds) Revisiting the Global Imaginary. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-14911-6_7
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