Facebook and Google: most powerful and secretive empires we've ever known

We need better language to describe the technology companies that control the digital worlds in which we speak, play and live

Google and Facebook have conveyed nearly all of us to this page, and just about every other idea or expression we'll encounter today. Yet we don't know how to talk about these companies, nor digest their sheer power.

We call them platforms, networks or gatekeepers. But these labels hardly fit. The appropriate metaphor eludes us; even if we describe them as vast empires, they are unlike any we've ever known. Far from being discrete points of departure, merely supporting the action or minding the gates, they have become something much more significant. They have become the medium through which we experience and understand the world.