Google Me

A witty, philosophically-informed, and openly polemical critique by Barbara Cassin of Google that looks at Google’s claims to organize knowledge, and its alleged ethical basis. This critique goes to the heart of the assumed benefits to humanity of increasingly advanced internet technology.

Cassin Barbara :

Barbara Cassin is Director of Research at the CNRS in Paris and a member of the Académie Française. Her widely discussed Dictionary of Untranslatables has been translated into seven languages, and her Nostalgia: When Are we Ever at Home? won the 2015 French Voices Grand Prize. Her most recent books to appear in English are Google Me: One-Click Democracy and, with Alain Badiou, There’s No Such Thing as a Sexual Relationship.Syrotinski Michael :

Michael Syrotinski is Marshal Professor of French at the University of Glasgow, Scotland. He is the author of Deconstruction and the Postcolonial and cotranslator of Cassin’s Dictionary of Untranslatables.Barbara Cassin (Author)
Barbara Cassin is Director of Research at the CNRS in Paris and President of the Collège International de Philosophie. Her Dictionary of Untranslatables has been adapted into five languages, and her Nostalgia: When Are We Ever at Home? won the 2015 French Voices Grand Prize. Her most recent book to appear in English is Heidegger: His Life and His Philosophy (coauthored with Alain Badiou).

Michael Syrotinski (Translator)
Michael Syrotinski is Marshall Professor of French at the University of Glasgow.

Mark B. N. Hansen, Duke University:
A readable and entertaining, yet serious indictment of informational culture. Cassin, a philosopher and renowned scholar of ancient thought, brings a philosophical perspective to the rise of Google and its impact on a wide range of cultural activities. Her reflections give us a critical space to consider the cost of our acquiescence to the quantification of culture that lies at the heart of today’s information-driven capitalism. The result is a provocative and potentially transformative contribution to contemporary scholarship on Google and internet culture more generally.

First published in the age of Mission Accomplished, Google Me reads as prophetic in the age of America First. Cassin reframes our current debates about the health of democracy in a technological-neoliberal age within a broader philosophical context. Our iPhones and algorithms have not brought forth a new world, they've just added a 21st-century gloss to an ancient problem.