59 On the dangers of Google’s political radicality and absolute power see Mathias Döpfner's letter to Eric Schmidt, Google’s Executive Chairman, entitled ‘Why We Fear Google’, and Shoshana Zuboff’s answer ‘Dark Google’. Both articles were published online by the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung in April 2014. 60 Bruce Sterling, in the aforementioned Wired interview, quotes Casaleggio saying that TV does not interest him: ‘it’s like talking about the dinosaurs… It makes no sense to talk about the future of the dinosaurs, because they are extinct.’
basis of the rank and file of any political movement based on network cultures. 56 Data is data and the better is the data, the better are the analyses, the results; and, as in the case of Google, the better is the capacity and overall performance of its search algorithms’ the more rewarded its users. Why does a user-voter choose a certain party? 57 Why does s/he feel more empathetic to certain topics rather than others? What are the user-voter’s personal inclinations? How much and how finely can a user's profile be tailored?
The googlization of politics
61 The dimensions of which were relatively small in occasion of the April 2013 ‘Quirinarie’: 28,518 users voted to elect the movement candidate to the role of President of the Italian Republic
What can politics learn from Google? Certainly it can absorb the neutral and uncritical relation existing among the most disparate data. Chris Anderson writes that Google won its current role of global advertising industry thanks to applied mathematics; in other words thanks to its famous PageRank algorithm. Google claimed neither to know the advertising industry nor to want to master it; it simply assumed that the best information – data processed with great analytical tools – would prevail in such a highly-competitive market. Google was right and it has achieved records results. It is hard to say whether a political version of PageRank58 will ever be put together; until this point, Casaleggio has been the politician most interested in the Google model. He claimed neither to know the politics industry nor to want to master it; he simply assumed that the best information – data processed with great analytical tools – would prevail in such a highly-competitive market. Thanks to the successful strategies of Casaleggio’s digital populism, we are now witnessing the emergence of an impressive power, one that is rapidly moving from abstract cyberspace to socio-political reality.59 The googlization of politics is therefore part of the algorithmic regulation that controls our society. It is not a mere political choreography, nor a new complication of politics. Today we are, already and unconsciously, facing a reality where politics is approximated by computational techniques.
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Obsolete Capitalism