Alphabet, Google's holding company, is now the second largest company in the world. In terms of market capitalization, Apple is first. Together with Amazon and Microsoft, followed avidly by Facebook in seventh place, the four form an increasingly feared global oligopoly. This growing global dominance of US news companies is unexpected. Just ten years ago, Exxon, Walmart, China National Petroleum and Industrial and Commercial Bank of China topped the list of companies with the largest market capitalization. No Internet company made it to the top five. Today, four of the top five are American information technology ships. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on "Why Violent Video Games Shouldn't Be Banned"? Get an original essay So why isn't this book called Upending the Apple Cart? Or Facebook and the Four Horsemen? Because Google, alone among the five, is the protagonist of an apparently successful new "world system". Represented in all the most prestigious US universities and media centers, it is rapidly spreading among the world's intelligentsia, from Mountain View to Tel Aviv to Beijing. That phrase, “world system,” which I borrow from Neal Stephenson's Baroque Cycle novel about Isaac Newton and Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, denotes a set of ideas that pervade a society's technology and institutions and inform its civilization. of the world, Newton brought together two themes. Embedded in his calculus and physics, a Newtonian revelation made the physical world predictable and measurable. Another, less celebrated, was his key role in establishing a reliable gold standard, which made economic valuations as calculable and reliable as the physical dimensions of items in commerce. Since Claude Shannon in 1948 and Peter Drucker in the 1950s, we have all talked about the information economy as if it were a new idea. But both Newton's physics and his gold standard were information systems. More specifically, the Newtonian system is what we now call information theory. Newton's biographers generally underestimate his successes in establishing the information theory of money on a solid foundation. As you write, supervise the minting of a national currency, catch some counterfeiters, increase an already respectable personal fortune, be a political figure, even dictate to your fellow scientists [as president of the Royal Society]; it should seem like an empty and crass ambition once you've written a Principia. But build a better money system and the world will open its way to your door. You can traverse the world trading for what you want and passing on the values ​​you trade for. The small island of Britain ruled an empire larger and incomparably richer than that of Rome. Many mocked Newton's passion for alchemy, the attempt to reverse engineer gold so that it could be made from base metals such as lead and mercury. “Everyone knows Newton as the great scientist. Few remember that he spent half his life tinkering with alchemy, searching for the Philosopher's Stone. That was the pebble he really wanted to find.” Newton's modern critics fail to appreciate how his alchemical endeavors produced knowledge crucial to his gold-based defense of the pound. All wealth is the product of knowledge. Matter is conserved; progress consists in learning to use it.4 Newton's knowledge, embodied in his world system, was what most critically distinguished the long millennia of economic stasis that preceded him from the three hundred years of miraculous growth following his death. The failure of his alchemy gave him – and.