Is Google good or evil?

Is Google good or is it evil? Is the company an all-knowing behemoth that is hubristically “transforming our lives”, big brother-style, with its intrusive technology or is it a plucky, selfless Silicon Valley start-up that is “audaciously” organizing all the world’s information for all of our benefit? Is Google Orwell or is it Disney?

The answer might depend on whether you trust the marketing instincts of English or American publishers. Last Tuesday, I was in London to do a debate at the Institute of Contemporary Arts (ICA) with the New York Times reporter and prolific Silicon Valley based author Randall Stross who has just written a highly informative and strictly unbiased new book about Google called Planet Google. Stross’ main point is that Google – through its ubiquitous search engine artificial algorithm, Google Earth and Google Sky maps, G-mail email service, YouTube videos, Google Book Search, Google’s Android mobile phone and its myriad of other knowledge initiatives – has one simple goal: to manage all the world’s information. Stross even notes that Dr Eric Schmidt, Google’s CEO and PhD-in-chief (UC Berkeley 1982), has run the math and concluded that it will take the company exactly 300 years to index and search all the information in the world.

So does Stross argue that this makes Google good or evil? It may all depend on whether you buy Planet Google in the US or UK. In America, the book (published by Free Press) comes with the cheerful subtitle One Company’s Audacious To Organize Everything We Know; while its British publisher (Atlantic Books) have given the same book the much more ominous subtitle How One Company is Transforming Our Lives. Identical book, identical author, identical information, same one company -- but an entirely different vibe about what Google is really up to.

This Anglo-American ambivalence over Google reflects, I suspect, our universal ambivalence about Google. The truth -- and even on planet Google there remain truths -- is that Google’s greed for knowledge is both thrillingly audacious and terrifyingly threatening.  Google is, in fact, a co Orwell-Disney production. The company wants to know everything about us so that it can help us in every way. Room 101, then, on planet Google, is a brightly lit, cheerful place where we can, at a click of a mouse, know all there is know about ourselves, our neighbors and the world.

Is this what we’ve always wanted or what we’ve always feared? Is planet Google a nightmare or is it a dream?

According to Randall Stross, Google is beyond good and evil. In his book, he explains that the numerati at Google are meticulously organizing their mission to become organizers of all the world’s information. Eric Schmidt has worked out that between 2 and 3% of today’s information about the world is searchable -- but that in 300 years time, 100% of this information will have been sorted and indexed by Google. By 2308, then, we really will be living on Schmidt’s planet Google. And I am simultaneously relieved and rather miffed – yes, that all-too-typical ambivalence about Google -- that I won’t be around to observe this peculiarly familiar new world.

Comments

[Vince Williams]

If Stross says Google is beyond good and evil, then I'll follow Nietszche and dispense with the good vs. evil dialectics.

It's only a matter of time before the enormous and fearsome power of Google becomes a political issue for those who don't care to live under the 'foreign' domination of an insidious algorithm-- those same people who find it terrible enough to be enslaved by their own appetites, much less by the will to power of would-be deities.

But not until wired humankind transcends the collective neurosis of consumerism will the world be ready for such a necessary 'cosmic renovation'.

In the meantime, we might take a cue from the ongoing financial debacle and consider that a search engine "unregulated by philosophy is a danger to soul and community."
.......

[Stephen Smoliar]

Well put, Vince. If we accept Anthony Giddens' model that the three dimensions of a social structure are signification, domination, and legitimation, then those "good vs. evil dialects" matter only along the dimension of legitimation (i.e. acceptable normative behaviors). The real question (as it was when the Nazis embraced Nietzsche) concerns what is happening along the domination dimension. This is all the more dangerous because both those within the Googleplex and all those who evangelize on their behalf are still narrow-minded enough to believe that signification is the only dimension that matters. That's what comes out of falling asleep in humanities classes!

[Sue Schofield]

Andrew, darling,

This 'Google is taking over the world' schtick is eating away at your heart.

You need a holiday.

There's a new AC/DC album released this week, and you're still worrying about Google, already?

Liliputian gnome Jeff Jarvis has already announced he's going to not write a book about the book he's writing about Google, and the world ain't going to stop when he does. Or doesn't. The vile bounder was at some awful sausage-fest in Germany last week, bleating on about his latest tome. Europe now, is it?

What is he? The Flying Doctor, already?

Puh-lease.

Yoorop is so far spared the wacky undulations of virtual pundits with nothing to sell but chutzpah, and all day to sell it in.

Here, in the shires of Englandville, we still understand heavy industry and old meeja. We have coal-dust under our finger-nails, ink in our veins, and Disraeli Gears in our Winamp playlist.

We're selling it to China like it's going out of fashion.

So chill out, baby. Take the wife and kids down the Pacific Coast Highway in a Winnebago. Read some Hunter S Thompson. Work on the tan. Think about that Triumph Bonneville you always wanted. (Black ones are faster.)
Ditch the laser printer and the Air Miles.

China has better food than the US, their television and the internet is Government regulated. Could we ask for much more?

Dialectic eclectism was OK in its day, but really baby, we're all relying on Bejing, now.

Unlike Jarvis. Leave the entire festering mess to him, and like, write some more 'proper' books.

And stay off the internet. It makes your brain shrink.

Stay hep, doodio. See you in the motorhome park. And bring the offset litho. We're going to be riiiiich!

Yay!

Sue