A torrent of previously dammed-up speech washed over the internet. The story began like a fairy tale offered up to the rest of the planet: the giddy opening of infinite spaces and labyrinths of intelligence the vertiginous feeling of having all the known world within one’s grasp the joy, for those living at the edges in remote villages or peripheral nations, of gaining access to globalized methods of socialization and personal growth.ĭerek Thompson: The attention economy is a Malthusian trapįor people who previously had no collective importance, who were forbidden to speak or even to possess a narrative and a story of their own, the fairy tale promised new possibilities for expression and freedom. It took only a short amount of time for a band of young people, working in their garages and dorm rooms, to dream up and put into practice the equations and protocols that underpin this electronic empire, a system of influence and control whose strength is gradually coming to be seen as greater than that of the old empire and its heavy equipment.
At the same time: No, because the new empire with a digital face has no interest in spreading or maintaining what were once called American values. Yes, because these companies-though they are so completely unrooted as to be almost governed by no law, not even that of the United States-are in their culture and language unmistakably American. This America that you are not the first to say is in decline, isn’t it the center of a revolution that has changed the face of humanity and made America more dominant than ever? Yet others might say: Aren’t you crying over yesterday’s American empire? The real empire is busy exerting its global domination through GAFA-Google, Amazon, Facebook, Apple-which were born on the West Coast of the United States and have become states within a state, empires within the empire. This essay was adapted from The Empire and the Five Kings: America’s Abdication and the Fate of the World, by Bernard-Henri Lévy.
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