The Circle of the Snake is an engaged and smoothly flowing argument for the disruptive power of Big Tech that culminates in a final call for dismantling the more and more visible totalitarian might of the US tech corporations. Written by Grafton Tanner as an extended, book version of his articles published in The Los Angeles Review of Books and The Hong Kong Review of Books, the work takes advantage of a recently noticeable popular nostalgia for the end-of-the-20th-century years in order to manifest means in which the Big Tech manipulates, detracts, and dumbfounds its users.
The old myth
The social media companies claim to create an ideal space starting with the intended, structural invisibility of human labour behind the Big Tech companies, be it on the Asia-located production sites or of content moderators traumatized by materials they have to go through of a measured and open public debate. They reverberate with the old myth that technology, the digital technology of our times, can solve all humanity’s problems. This digital utopia is being conveyed on many social levels simultaneously. It stands, however, in contrast with means of monetizing social media activity, based on garnering clicks, attention, active engagement, and finally, as extensive information about the . . .
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