Sinister Phase Two?
A couple weeks ago I got into a joking discussion with a friend about how the only serious threat to the American Neoconservative military and political movement was not the Democratic Party but Google. One assumes that any Silicon Valley company with a lighthearted air is run by liberals — in Google’s case, liberals who don’t exude the pandering helplessness of many a Democratic ticket. (I don’t want to assume a political affiliation for a search engine, but according to a USA Today report, ninety-eight percent of the money given by Google employees to 2004 political candidates was given to Democrats.) Google is more respected than the Democratic Party, and maybe even more powerful. If Barack Obama ran in 2008 for the GOOP (Google Party), who would you vote for? But, my friend and I reasoned, unlike the Democratic Party, few people even know who Google is, and no one knows what Google wants. The name Eric Schmidt meant nothing to me at the time — I might have briefly wondered if he’d played third base for the Phillies in the 1970s. Eric Schmidt is Google’s CEO. I know that because I Googled it. My friend then related a news story he’d read about Google’s plans to buy up mass quantities of dark fiber, fiber-optic cable that’s been laid but is not in use. Then, after a moment of thoughtful pause, he declared: “Google wants to own the Internet.”
If you were to compare today’s Republican party to a major corporation, none seems a more apt fit than Enron just before the fall: they’re extremely powerful and ruthlessly exploitative of vulnerable markets, and their rampant incompetencies are rendered almost irrelevant by their ability to control public opinion. But if Google were a political party, what would it be? Thinking aloud to my friend, I tried to imagine what life would be like the day after Google toppled the Republican Party in a future election. People like you and I would be deliriously happy. . . for about a week. And then we’d realize that we’d given power to a faceless government that already knew everything about us and controlled our access to information completely. And they would be more inhuman than anything we’d ever dreamed of. “If I have ever glimpsed the gleaming eyes of Big Brother on this earth,” we would say to one another sagely, wondering why Yahoo! was down, “It is in those red and yellow circles.”
In March of 2001, The Onion ran a story called “Starbucks To Begin Sinister ‘Phase Two’ Of Operation.” All of the coffee houses were simultaneously closed for repurposing, locked behind titanium shutters. No one was quite sure what this meant, but among the more ominous signs was that “the familiar Starbucks logo [was] slightly altered to present the familiar mermaid figure as a cyclopean mermaid whose all-seeing eye forms the apex of a world-spanning pyramid.” (They had also “stopped buying stirrers altogether.”) It is interesting to note that if The Onion ran that same story next week about Google, it would be too close to a plausible scenario to be particularly funny.
Still, we can’t just assume that one day Google will turn into the sum of all of our futuristic fears. That’s empty cynicism, and no more valid than to assume that Google is perfect and will remain so forever and ever. After all, Google is a company whose unofficial corporate motto is “Don’t Be Evil,” a phrase which seems to be viewed with little irony thus far, despite the ease with which it can be imagined painted on the side of a barn and read by talking pigs and sheep. Google’s founders and CEO each make a salary of $1. Engineers are encouraged to spend twenty percent of their salaried hours on projects that interest them personally. One of the five pillars of workplace conduct at Google is their Dog Policy. One imagines hallways strewn with fitness balls and slides where staircases ought to be. In its workplace trappings and corporate culture, Google is a classic depiction of a dot com utopia.
This brings up an interesting question, one that nine out of ten people have too much rote cynicism to take seriously: what if Google is a utopia? This is not to say a place of perfection, but a place that’s the human equivalent thereof. Not the perfect ideal, but the perfect ideal shrunk and necessarily compromised to its best workable model; the closest we can get on this earth. If there’s a more deserving candidate than Google for the title of corporate utopia, I can’t think of it. But a “corporate utopia” is, to most rational people, a dead dream encased within an oxymoron. Corporations are personified in the logo of The Corporation, men with briefcases and devil’s tails. We do not seem able to believe in any utopia that is not a negative one; in our minds every white and gleaming facade is surely a mausoleum. If we are lucky, the utopia is simply revealed to be fundamentally unsound, and crumbles away. If we are unlucky, we are bound for totalitarian rule, and the next question to ask ourselves is: “Soma or Victory Gin?”
In late January, Business 2.0 magazine published an article called “Imagining the Google Future,” wherein experts plotted four scenarios for the future of the company. One was titled “Google is the media,” the next “Google is the Internet,” the third “Google is dead” and the last “Google is God.” The second scenario is the most plausible. It’s just an extension of what Google is doing now. Google is already my Internet telephone directory (and my postal service, and my road atlas, and to some extent my shopping guide and newspaper), so it’s no great leap to believe that it will one day be my Internet telephone company as well, providing a shining net of free wireless access across any city I’d want to live in. Google is poised to create their own browser (the Gbrowser domain name was copyrighted in 2004), and even their own operating system, the chief question is whether they’ll want to bother, or prefer to simply sit back and support open source products like Firefox, Open Office and Linux, all of which are in competition with Microsoft anyhow. Google has been so overwhelmingly successful at building a free and better mousetrap in so many arenas of Internet life that I’d really not be very surprised if sometime in the future I’m able to catch bothersome rodents in tiny, fantastical stasis boxes emblazoned with large ‘G’s that magically appear at my house free of charge whenever I buy cheese.
The most interesting argument of the “Google is dead” article is that the Internet community will eventually turn on Google — not out of fear or malice but out of sheer profitability. If I can use my knowledge of Google unscrupulously to make the biography of George W. Bush appear as the first Google result when I type in “miserable failure,” can’t I also use that same knowledge to make “city library” or “Kanye West Grammys” return the homepage of whatever porn site will pay me the most money? The practice of search engine optimization could make the act of hampering Google’s functionality into a huge cash cow. Even when there’s no money involved, successfully messing with Google will mean credibility — Google will become more and more the great monolith that everyone with a can of proverbial spray paint wants to tag. From the lowliest hackers to the largest world governments, everyone will be bringing a conflict to Google in some way. (Last August the U.S. government demanded that Google turn over all of the terms input for search over a single, unspecified week, plus a million random web addresses from Google databases. The cited reason for this was a need for the government to back up its case for correctly enforcing online pornography laws. Happily, Google declined.) Even if Google continues to grow despite these challenges, its own omnipresence will begin to work against it. Sooner or later serious concerns will arise that Google is Big Brother, and people will use Yahoo! or other search engines, even if they know they’re second-rate, out of disestablishmentarianism, or the feeling that they’re making a grass-roots, humanistic choice, or out of simple paranoia.
If it seems inevitable that many, many people will eventually turn on Google for a hundred reasons of great or little validity, is it not also inevitable that Google will turn on people? Already Google is drawing demonstrations for the opening of its censored China portal, www.google.cn, which filters certain keywords. (A query of “Tiananmen,” for example, is said to returns no reference to the Tiananmen Square protests of 1989. This must only be true if one searches from within China, however. Professor Yeti himself gets twelve pictures of tanks.) Google claims that its portal is nonetheless beneficial to the Chinese people, lest Google be censored in China altogether, but Google’s complicity in repression here is still undeniable. Does Google’s cooperation with China signify that Google will come to resemble China? That’s a bit of a leap. Still, though I have to leave the question of Google’s future path of good or evil unanswered, for I am no futurist, I will admit to this: I do feel a slight fear of criticizing them. Beyond the ever-present fear that my criticisms are unfounded and will later appear stupid, I’d get the same chill of needless danger from provoking Google that I might get from heckling a police officer. All that would prevent Google from revenging itself upon me more thoroughly than I care to think about is its own uncertain morality.
Chris Leslie-Hynan loves Google, he thinks it is just the best thing ever.
December 9th, 2006 at 9:02 am
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