“We Will Never Be Rid of Google” (The New York Times, September 30) is quite a headline for the same Julia Angwin who wrote the book on MySpace.

Angwin’s comprehensive unofficial account was published in 2009 as Stealing MySpace: The Battle to Control the Most Popular Website in America (not “We Will Never Be Rid of MySpace”). Its subtitle didn’t remain current for long: Facebook’s international reach already made the “in America” qualifier requisite for the other social network by 2008. Still, the snapshot of the then-hip site, not yet a punchline in a David Pogue Times column exemplifying when “a hot property becomes a lame has-been” (alongside action star Steven Seagal, well after his career transition from Hard to Kill to direct-to-video, and the Macarena dance craze), remains an instructive case study.

In Angwin’s own words, the juggernaut “now positioned to further entrench its dominance of our information landscape” due to lack of antitrust enforcement was a parenthetical in the post-Y2K cyberspace from which MySpace emerged: “In early 2003 the dot-com boom was over, and the next Internet boom had not yet begun. During this in-between period, only the big three companies — AOL, MSN, and Yahoo ([MySpace cofounder Chris] DeWolfe called them ‘the untouchable triumvirate’) — were thriving  (Google had not yet taken off.)” The first of the troika disconnected its formerly ubiquitous dial-up service on the same day that “We Will Never Be Rid of Google” saw fit to see print.

While Angwin asserts that “Google has an unassailable lead in collecting and analyzing data from across the web” in 2025, in 2009 she had noted that by 2003, “even high school students could build expert-looking webpages;” upstarts like MySpace no longer “required massive computer resources and huge teams of computer programmers” as they had when Google and Yahoo were founded in the 1990s. Individual web designers unaffiliated with Google have made such improvements to its core services as &udm=14, which automatically filters out AI from Google web searches, and Filmot for finding phrases in video subtitles on Google-owned YouTube.

Angwin’s desired future of “competing search engines that offer different experiences” independently of Google already exists, albeit unevenly distributed in the remaining 10% of total search traffic, from generalists such as DuckDuckGo whose crawlers span the publicly accessible World Wide Web, to the hyper-specific likes of “The Geocities Animated Gif Search.”

To be sure, their names are harder to remember, even when typable just as quickly, but Google’s originated as a pun on a previously obscure math term for a quantity so ludicrously gigantic as to defy any conceivable practical use. So did that of their Googleplex headquarters; but is the relevant quantity not a googol or even a googolplex, so much as the trillions spent by the Pentagon?

Angwin highlights the tech maverick’s “small but growing defense contracts” —  an example of how “despite its power in the marketplace, Google is still vulnerable to all kinds of pressure campaigns from the government.” Yet apparently it simultaneously possesses “unfettered market power” — a contradiction untangled by libertarian activist Karl Hess in a 1970 New York Times Magazine profile: “We have the illusion of freedom only because so few ever try to exercise it. Try it sometime. … We have all the freedom of a balloon floating in a pin factory.”

Angwin’s feared “possible future in which the administration starts pressuring Google to shape search results in its favor” was already the present reality during the four years of the Biden administration (and even Trump’s first four years). As Jenin Younes explained in “How Biden Enabled Trump’s Censorship” (Compact, March 19): “the lesson of the past five years is clear: Civil-liberties violations that you countenance will be turned against you sooner than you expect. That is why we need a renewed commitment to civil liberties from both the left and the right, not the sort we have seen in which each side uses the concept as a cudgel when convenient.”

Humanistic psychologist Abraham Maslow made a frequently paraphrased observation that “I suppose it is tempting, if the only tool you have is a hammer, to treat everything as if it were a nail.” You should be less so inclined when you don’t have the hammer — especially when it’s about to be used on you.

New Yorker Joel Schlosberg is a senior news analyst at The William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism.

PUBLICATION/CITATION HISTORY

“When [David] Graeber died, five years ago today, he was just about the most important public intellectual in the world” asserts Thomas Peermohamed Lambert (“David Graeber: the Left’s lost hero,” UnHerd, September 2).  An unlikely position for the author of tomes covering “some of the most mind-numbing subjects,” from the originations of finance to managerial administration, whose defiant anti-authoritarianism apparently mapped “a kind of ‘road not taken’ for the political Left” which has since veered ever more sharply into pinning all their hopes and fears on the next election.

Yet Lambert can count Graeber’s bestsellers “among the few genuinely popular Left-wing texts of our time,” offering “the same, visceral appeal as today’s Right-wing populists” — who have taken up such themes as emphasizing “‘values’ as distinct from ‘value'” (no longer the domain of such leftists as The Value of Nothing: How to Reshape Market Society and Redefine Democracy author Raj Patel),  “paeans to untrammeled human creativity” Graeber made in the face of the sort of tech billionaire via which such techno-utopianism is now judged guilty by association, and exploring “the horrors of modern bureaucracy” while “the ‘b’ word is hardly ever uttered by progressives” (at least those who, unlike Argentine comic-strip character Mafalda, don’t need to holler the name of an eponymous pet turtle) more comfortable with “the language of enlightened paternalism.”

Even being “deeply anti-capitalist, and convinced that the society he lived in needed massive social transformation,” which Lambert points to as the dividing line between Graeber and the right, could easily sound closer to the “Birkenstocked Burkeans” of National Review‘s Rod Dreher than a Biden-era brat summer. The Economist, the newspaper in which Lambert locates the “orthodox line of rebuttal” to Graeber that seemingly wasteful jobs “ultimately benefit humanity by increasing production,” had once employed the laissez-faire liberal Herbert Spencer who had argued that in self-managed worker cooperatives where “each obtains exactly the remuneration due for his work, minus only the cost of administration, the productive power of the concern is greatly increased.”

Graeber would at least not quarrel with Lambert that avowed anarchism was “far rarer in academic life” than Marxism.”  In 2004, Graeber himself had asserted (with coauthor Andrej Grubacic) that “there are still thousands of academic Marxists, but almost no academic anarchists,” with the professoriate preferring “the only great social movement that was invented by a Ph.D.” Even then, the ranks of respected academic anarchist anthropologists included Harold Barclay and James C. Scott together with Graeber. And for decades before and since 2004, one of the all-time most cited living academics has been anti-Marxist anarchist Noam Chomsky.

Auburn’s academic anarchist Roderick Long summed up: “Graeber’s liberatory vision” has much of value as “a useful corrective for those” — including Graeber himself, who had previously dismissed “terms like free enterprise” as cover for “the sordid economic reality, one where productive wealth was controlled by the few for their own benefit” — “who are too quick to take the case for free enterprise as a validation of the perversities of the existing … market.”

New Yorker Joel Schlosberg is a senior news analyst at The William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism.

PUBLICATION/CITATION HISTORY

1. “Disinterring Graeber: The First Five Years” by Joel Schlosberg, CounterPunch, September 8, 2025
2. “Disinterring Graeber: The First Five Years” by Joel Schlosberg, Mat-Su Valley Frontiersman [Wasilla, Alaska], September 8, 2025

Six decades after Tom Lehrer adapted his songs on such then-current topics as the Second Vatican Council and the vice-presidency of Hubert Horatio Humphrey from NBC’s That Was the Week That Was into his final album That Was the Year That Was, it remains clear that his works will remain relevant weeks, and years, after his passing on July 26 at 97.

Even at 37, Lehrer agonized that “when Mozart was my age, he had been dead for two years.” The more contemporary composer Gustav Mahler had been decomposing for 53 when his widow Alma was memorialized by Lehrer.  An ongoing outpouring of letters to the editor testifies to the outstanding memorableness of Lehrer’s musical output, such as Stephen DeBock’s in the August 1 Wall Street Journal recalling how his “devout Christian mother, upon hearing ‘The Vatican Rag,’ begged me to play it again and again as tears of laughter streamed down her cheeks” — while the popular music of today makes even such then-edgier albums sharing the mid-Sixties Billboard charts with Lehrer as Whipped Cream & Other Delights seem as reverential as Mahler’s Resurrection Symphony.

Admittedly, as LA Times columnist Michael Hiltzik noted on Lehrer’s 90th birthday, writing about “racial conflict, pollution, religious intolerance, nuclear brinkmanship” ensured engaging issues that “have never gone away.”  If anything, Lehrer underestimated the political rancor to come.  The current wave of anti-obscenity legislation won’t be opposed as openly by either what Lehrer called “the civil liberties types who are fighting this issue … as a matter of freedom of speech and stifling of free expression” or by those like himself for whom “dirty books are fun!”  He quipped of the era’s Cold War enemies that “Russia got the bomb, but that’s OK, ’cause the balance of power’s maintained that way” and “China got the bomb, but have no fears; they can’t wipe us out for at least five years.”

In the 2003 book Seriously Funny: The Rebel Comedians of the 1950s and 1960s, Lehrer is quoted as a self-described “wishy-washy liberal” who sees little mettle in playing one of his most-requested ditties since “everyone is against pollution.”  Yet the ozone layer was saved from chlorofluorocarbon corrosion in large part via staunch conservative Margaret Thatcher — and thus, as Carl Sagan pointed out, the British leader’s “early studies in chemistry” — while the Ronald Reagan Lehrer jibed years before winning elections initiated nuclear arms reductions influenced by the dramatized telefilm The Day After.

Lehrer foresaw a future where competition between nations produced nuclear weaponry “transistorized at half the price.”  Further exponential dwindling of costs, mostly in areas distant enough from politics for real market competition, has produced a world closer to the surreal exaggerations of Gary Larson’s The Far Side, in which “the Hendersons have the bomb” on the lawn next door. Properly harnessed for social cooperation, free choices can join neighborhoods and nations in harmony, without the chorus being Lehrer’s “We Will All Go Together When We Go.”

New Yorker Joel Schlosberg is a senior news analyst at The William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism.

PUBLICATION/CITATION HISTORY

1. “This is Still Tom Lehrer’s Week That Was” by Joel Schlosberg, CounterPunch, August 4, 2025