Alphabet, the holding company of Google, is now the second largest company in the world. In terms of market capitalization, Apple is first. Joined by Amazon and Microsoft, followed avidly by Facebook in seventh place, the four form an increasingly feared global oligopoly. This growing global dominance of American information companies is unexpected. Just a decade ago, Exxon, Walmart, China National Petroleum and the Industrial and Commercial Bank of China topped the list of companies with the largest market capitalizations. No internet companies made 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 Should Not Be Banned”? Get an original essayWhy then 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 American universities and media centers, it is rapidly spreading among the global intelligentsia, from Mountain View to Tel Aviv to Beijing. This expression, "world system", which I borrow from Neal Stephenson's Baroque Cycle novel about Isaac Newton and Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, designates a set of ideas that permeate the technology and institutions of a society and inform its civilization . of the world, Newton brought together two themes. Embodied in its calculus and physics, a Newtonian revelation made the physical world predictable and measurable. Another, less famous, is his key role in establishing a reliable gold standard, which made economic valuations as calculable and reliable as the physical dimensions of items traded. 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 Newton's physics and its gold standard were information systems. More precisely, the Newtonian system is what we today call an information theory. Newton's biographers generally underestimate his achievement in establishing the information theory of money on a firm footing. As one of them writes, monitoring the minting of a country's currency, catching a few counterfeiters, increasing an already respectable personal fortune, being a political figure, even dictating to one's scientific colleagues [as President of the Royal Society]; all this should seem like a crude and meaningless ambition once you have written Principia. But build a better financial ratchet and the world will beat a path to your door. You can travel the world trading what you want and transmitting the values ​​you trade for. The small island of Britain ruled an empire larger and incomparably richer than that of Rome. Many ridiculed Newton's preoccupation with alchemy, the attempt to reverse engineer gold so that it could be made from common metals such as lead and mercury. “Everyone knows Newton as a great scientist. Few remember that he spent half his life messing around with alchemy, searching for the philosopher's stone. This was the rock he really wanted to find. » Modern critics of Newton fail to understand how his alchemical efforts provided him with knowledge crucial to his defense of the golden pound. All wealth is the product of knowledge. Matter is preserved; THE.