Through Glass Darkly: On Google’s Gnostic Governance

For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face […] shall I know even as also I am known.

(St Paul, Corinthians 13:12)

In his 2013 novel The Circle (Eggers 2013), Dave Egger wrote of a fictional Silicon Valley corporation whose products and work environment blur distinctions between work and leisure, public and private, exposing every aspect of what was once private and personal, and thereby transforming the human condition. One need not, however, turn to fiction in order to hyperbolize the ambitions of Silicon Valley visionaries, when, at the same time as Eggers, technology journalists were writing that ‘something monumental is taking place, something that could change your life and work, your children’s future and the world in which your unborn descendants will live’ (Scoble and Israel 2013, 23). What kind of monumental event could possibly promise such sweeping transformations? The answer is Google Glass.