“The control of information is something the elite always do, particularly in a despotic form of government. Information, knowledge, is power. If you can control information, you can control people,” explained American writer Tom Clancy.
If information were power, then Google would be the most powerful institution on the planet. No other organisation had changed the way we think, the way we behave, the way we look at authority the way Google has. Not just through its ever-present search engine, but Google is building a series of products that run our lives – like Gmail, Google Maps, Android, Chrome – and now the company is developing products like driverless cars and surgical robots that promise to transform our lives. Information shapes our behaviour, it defines how we should live, and it decreases our uncertainty about our environments to make informed decisions.
No wonder the dictator Al-Sisi shuts down opposition media, criminalising any dissidents in Egypt, leaving only the government narrative and Al-Sisi’s fatwas allowed. “The Internet, an immeasurably powerful computing system, is subsuming most of our other intellectual technologies. It’s becoming our map and our clock, our printing press and our typewriter, our calculator and our telephone, and our radio and TV,” said Nicolas Carr in his article in The Atlantic.
