Who names a book “Life after Google?”  How provocative and seemingly out of touch with reality.  Everyone knows that Google is “King of the Internet” and is here to stay forever, right?  ALL HAIL!

    After reading George Gilder’s “Life after Google”, I am convinced that Gilder was slightly naive about his conclusion that Google would soon give way to a new form of the internet, the Blockchain.  Having said that, he’s not nearly as naive as anyone who sits here barely informed on Google, it’s religion, and the villains who are achieving their unholy “new system of the world” through it.  But, for the naivity of Gilder on some scores, this book is an invaluable tool that offers insights on multiple levels and dimensions that most are probably unaware of while providing some hope and solutions in an even darker era than when he published this book two years ago.

     First, a little about the author.  George Gilder has been a “futurist” right up there with the best of them for the last 50 years.  He has never shied from providing many controversial “taboo” takes, beginning early in his career.  After repenting from his 1966 “The Party that Lost its Head”, the inactive marine and Harvard grad has leveled off as a unique conservative social commentator and economist.  In defending the traditional societal roles of men and women, respectively, in his 1972 book “Sexual Suicide” and again in Men and Marriage (1986), he earned a reputation as a “chauvinist”.  But I suppose if time magazine names you “Male Chauvanist of the Year”, you might consider it a badge of honor.

    Gilder loves promoting “Life after Google” my reciting his famous line from an earlier work, “Life after Television” where he successfully predicted the death of television and the rise of the Smart Phone internet world long before it was in vogue to do so.  In 1990 he said, “The computer of the future will be as portable as your watch and as personal as your wallet. It will recognize speech and navigate streets, collect your mail and your news”.  When Gilder wrote “Life after Google”, I believe he thought he was making a similar bold prediction.  If I had read “Life after Google” before Covid, I might have been convinced that the collapse of the  Silicon Valley gargantuan was indeed inevitable.  

    To begin, Gilder puts things into perspective by reminding everyone who the top five businesses in the world are.  Surprise, while ten years ago they were all traditional industries, they are now all Silicon Valley companies.  In 2018, Google was number two, Apple was number one, Amazon was in the top five, and Facebook came in at number seven.  Thank goodness all of the heads of these companies share all of your values, right?  Actually, the masters of Google couldn’t be more opposed to your values and your way of life.  They are opposed in ways that are barely talked about and that are practically off the consciousness of the average person doing his 30th “Google” search of the day.  

    Why does Gilder go after Google instead of company number one, Apple?  Because Apple is number one because they still sell great products.  Google is number two because they figured out how to re-imagine the customer/product dynamic altogether.  Gilder observes that everything Google offers is “free” (aren’t they so cool and generous like that).  How do they provide search, maps, gmail, and work on Waymo self-driving cars while giving away all of their “products”.  Simple, if you don’t pay a dollar to Google directly, you aren’t using products at all.  YOU are the product.  Ninety-five percent of Google’s revenue is from advertisements.  The advertisers are the customers.  How has Google perfected the art of selling to these advertisers?  By collecting your data.  All of it.  In fact, if you listen to the creators of Google, Larry Paige and Sergy Brin, it’s famous CEO, Eric Schmidt, and it’s chief engineer, Ray Kurzweil, you would know that their “googol” ambition has been, and continues to be collecting ALL of the data of the world at all times in order to create and build a new and better system of the world.

    You might be familiar with the first three men I mentioned, but perhaps you paused for a moment at the fourth, Ray Kurzweil.  Of course you did, hardly anyone knows about the master inventor of the synthesizer, man responsible for voice recognition on your phone, and once prodigy at MIT at age fifteen.  But considering how influential he is and how openly transhumanistic he is, you should know about him!  Ray Kurzweil has been given the keys to the engineering labs at Google, he influences some of the brightest young computer minds in the world, and he believes that a “singularity” is near.  Gilder's assessment is that Kurzweil believes this singularity will be “marked by a triumph of computation over human intelligence” (Gilder, 25) where “supercomputers in the ‘cloud’ are becoming so much more intelligent than you and command such a complete sensorium of multidimensional data streams from your brain and body that you will want these machines to take over most of the decisions of your life” (Gilder, 3).  Go listen to some of the statements Kurzweil regularly makes as a futurist with an 86% accuracy rating.  He predicts cloned “meat” as the de facto replacement for real meat and farms throughout the world, the use of “nano-particles” (bots) to clean our insides and to extend our lives substantially, and that by 2041 we will all upload our consciousness into the cloud.

    Combine this with Android’s (Google based) pulling of Parler in early 2021 and Google's cancellation of an AI ethics summit in 2019 because employees walked out when they heard that Kay Coles James, leader of the Heritage foundation was invited.  Apparently her statements against transgender-ism don’t jive with the “new system of the world”. 

    Humanity and the Western world are not sacred to Google and their proposed new system of the world.  This is partly rooted in their flawed anthropology.  Far from a Judaeo-Christian, Aristotelian, Augustinian, Thomistic view of man as the rational creature made in the image and likeness of God endowed with intellect and free choice of the will, Google operates under the premise that man simply has a better brain than other animals.  And this brain is really just a processing machine.  And while it may take only 14 W of energy for Garry Kasparov to lose a game of chess to Deep Blue, human energy efficiency as a processor does not compensate for the ever-growing gap between your processing ability and the ability of ever aggressively morphing deep learning machines produced by the transhumanists in Silicon Valley. 

      Furthermore, says Gilder,

     if the mind- that engine by which we pursue the truth of things- is simply a logic   
     machine then the combination of algorithm and data can produce one and only one        result. Such a vision is not only deterministic but ultimately dictatorial.  If there is a        
     moral imperative to pursue the truth, and the truth can be foundonly by the     
     centralized processing of all the data in the world, then all the data in the world, must,
     by the moral order implied, be gathered into one fold with one shepherd. Google may
     talk a good game about privacy, but private data are the mortal enemy of its system of
     the world.
     (Gilder, 22)

     What else would be the mortal enemy of a new system of the world?  Well, if Google and others truly are dedicated to a new system of the world, all of the aspects that make up the world’s system would stand in the way, right?  “A system of the world necessarily combines science and commerce, religion and philosophy, economics and epistemology” (Gilder, 19).  In other words, if Google desires to reset the world (wait, “reset”, where have I heard that language before?), then basically everything that makes up the customs and daily operations, basically all basic human goods, must be changed.  Religion must change (that’s not under attack is it?), commerce must change ( social scores and phones maybe), transportation MUST change (self driving cars), moral norms MUST change, marriage MUST change, how we deal with our bodily health MUST change, etc…  Everyone of these aspects of our lives, essential aspects of our basic human goods are up for grabs.  And as we have seen this past year, Big data is not the only entity that has set its ambitions on controlling, monetizing, and investing in these new ways all humans must participate in society moving forward.  Want to stick around for all of these wonderful changes we are moving toward?  Then bow down to your new overlords.  Maybe there is space for you once all you hold dear has been raped.

    Well that’s pretty bleak.  Actually, it just touches the surface.  The first half of the book goes much deeper and presents this much better than I can.  It’s probably under seven dollars on a used book site at this moment.  Know what the hell is actually going on and buy the book!

    However, Gilder also did his research and studied and interviewed the bold pioneers who have been opposing this new system of the world for over a decade now.  They have been pushing back against the proto new system of the world of Google, World Central Bankers, all who oppose internet privacy, the heads of the scam that is modern college education, etc… for over a decade now.  And they hold their own.  The heroes that Gilder found were the architects of Bitcoin and the Blockchain.  The “Cryptocosm” as Gilder has dubbed it.  I have to say Gilder makes great arguments for their likely success going forward as they oppose the new system of the world.  While Covid 19 and its exploitation at the expense of the old system of the world and humanity itself have certainly set back the inevitable collapse of Google, super elites, and other great re-setters, the second half of “Life after Google” is still VERY encouraging.  The natural weapons made to oppose these super villains are still valid weapons that can be used in this ever going fight.  The ingenuity and drive of these entrepreneurs who will not only not be tread upon, but will come out wildly profitable and, dare I say, heroic is quite real.

    To do justice to the solutions proposed, and to put them in terms of how they can still be used even after the heavy loses the free world has suffered in just one year, I will continue this review in a part two.  Please keep your eye out for it.  It will be much more hopeful and refreshing, I promise.  

God bless,

Gadfly