This chapter explains how Alphabet is influencing the construction and experiencing of pasts at the personal level. To provide some context, it is first noted that various key players associated with the megacorporation have suggested that privacy is (currently) dead. This death is then posited as being the result of our growing digital dossiers: i.e. the collection and storing of digital traces that can be associated with specific people. Following this, the chapter differentiates between two approaches – one more careful and the other more carefree – that individuals can employ when seeking to manage or account for the recallable pasts that are continuously being created by, and for, themselves. Finally, the chapter’s summary notes that – with specific regard to its impact on our personal pasts – Alphabet’s megacorporate status is not so much illustrated by the fact that many express concern about our growing digital dossiers, as it is by so many appearing to have already accepted that such growth is inevitable, and even desirable.

Chapter 6 proposes that, through its various investments, Alphabet is contributing to developments that could significantly extend our lifespan via biological and digital means. In doing so, the chapter first provides a very brief overview of Ray Kurzweil’s desire to live ‘forever’. Whilst acknowledging that at least some people are likely to always remain ready to die – given their desire to ascend (to heaven), egalitarian concerns, bioconservative tendencies or fear of boredom – it is posited that most people would, along with Ray Kurzweil, choose to (radically) extend their personal future if given the choice. In light of such, two approaches to managing such extended personal futures – termed the singular and sequential approach respectively – are detailed. Finally, the chapter concludes with a brief summary, and by noting that the life extension business could prove even more profitable than Alphabet’s current money-printing machine: Google advertising.

Much social science still fails to employ a now standard philosophical and scientific conceptualization of levels of analysis.In so doing, it still largely avoids the multilevel reasoning appropriate for social science, instead maintaining dogmatic attachments to one or another level of analysis, especially an individual-level one.

An analysis of the nature of modern “actors” or actorhood.Offers direct arguments about how the modern (European, now global) cultural system constructs the modern actor as an authorized agent for various interests. Seeing modern actorhood in this way helps greatly in explaining a number of otherwise anomalous or little analyzed features of modern individuals, organizations, and states.

Clarification of the ideas of institution, institutionalization, and institutionalism.Conceives of institutions as controlling patterns of widely varying sorts, relevant to the explanation of, and stabilization of, the behavior of the full range of modern actors.

Discusses empirical examples showing how the preference for individual-level explanation – that is, for psychological, social-psychological, and microeconomic explanation – has limited the explanation of a wide range of macrosocial outcomes: of European economic history, of postindustrial development, of world economic development and globalization generally.

Reflections on how sociological neoinstitutionalism has been used to understand the rise, nature, and impact of the modern world order as itself a society. Discussion of globalization, and large-scale social change, from this perspective. Includes a discussion of Anglo-European modernity as a quasi-religious system.

Presents the main arguments of sociological neoinstitutionalism in the areas of organizations, states, and identities.Illustrates the arguments with empirical research conducted through the year 2000.

The post-Enlightenment evolution of models of national society and state.The development of ideas of individual and collective actorhood, and the corresponding peripheralization of the concept of culture.

A new basic introduction to “sociological neoinstitutionalism,” placing the line of thought in intellectual context, and discussing the linkages of the core ideas to empirical research.