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Thread: Google, the New Super-State

  1. #1

    Default Google, the New Super-State

    Google’s Earth
    By WILLIAM GIBSON

    “I ACTUALLY think most people don’t want Google to answer their questions,” said the search giant’s chief executive, Eric Schmidt, in a recent and controversial interview. “They want Google to tell them what they should be doing next.” Do we really desire Google to tell us what we should be doing next? I believe that we do, though with some rather complicated qualifiers.

    Science fiction never imagined Google, but it certainly imagined computers that would advise us what to do. HAL 9000, in “2001: A Space Odyssey,” will forever come to mind, his advice, we assume, eminently reliable — before his malfunction. But HAL was a discrete entity, a genie in a bottle, something we imagined owning or being assigned. Google is a distributed entity, a two-way membrane, a game-changing tool on the order of the equally handy flint hand ax, with which we chop our way through the very densest thickets of information. Google is all of those things, and a very large and powerful corporation to boot.

    We have yet to take Google’s measure. We’ve seen nothing like it before, and we already perceive much of our world through it. We would all very much like to be sagely and reliably advised by our own private genie; we would like the genie to make the world more transparent, more easily navigable. Google does that for us: it makes everything in the world accessible to everyone, and everyone accessible to the world. But we see everyone looking in, and blame Google.

    Google is not ours. Which feels confusing, because we are its unpaid content-providers, in one way or another. We generate product for Google, our every search a minuscule contribution. Google is made of us, a sort of coral reef of human minds and their products. And still we balk at Mr. Schmidt’s claim that we want Google to tell us what to do next. Is he saying that when we search for dinner recommendations, Google might recommend a movie instead? If our genie recommended the movie, I imagine we’d go, intrigued. If Google did that, I imagine, we’d bridle, then begin our next search.

    We never imagined that artificial intelligence would be like this. We imagined discrete entities. Genies. We also seldom imagined (in spite of ample evidence) that emergent technologies would leave legislation in the dust, yet they do. In a world characterized by technologically driven change, we necessarily legislate after the fact, perpetually scrambling to catch up, while the core architectures of the future, increasingly, are erected by entities like Google.

    Cyberspace, not so long ago, was a specific elsewhere, one we visited periodically, peering into it from the familiar physical world. Now cyberspace has everted. Turned itself inside out. Colonized the physical. Making Google a central and evolving structural unit not only of the architecture of cyberspace, but of the world. This is the sort of thing that empires and nation-states did, before. But empires and nation-states weren’t organs of global human perception. They had their many eyes, certainly, but they didn’t constitute a single multiplex eye for the entire human species.

    Jeremy Bentham’s Panopticon prison design is a perennial metaphor in discussions of digital surveillance and data mining, but it doesn’t really suit an entity like Google. Bentham’s all-seeing eye looks down from a central viewpoint, the gaze of a Victorian warder. In Google, we are at once the surveilled and the individual retinal cells of the surveillant, however many millions of us, constantly if unconsciously participatory. We are part of a post-geographical, post-national super-state, one that handily says no to China. Or yes, depending on profit considerations and strategy. But we do not participate in Google on that level. We’re citizens, but without rights.
    Much of the discussion of Mr. Schmidt’s interview centered on another comment: his suggestion that young people who catastrophically expose their private lives via social networking sites might need to be granted a name change and a fresh identity as adults. This, interestingly, is a matter of Google letting societal chips fall where they may, to be tidied by lawmakers and legislation as best they can, while the erection of new world architecture continues apace.

    If Google were sufficiently concerned about this, perhaps the company should issue children with free “training wheels” identities at birth, terminating at the age of majority. One could then either opt to connect one’s adult identity to one’s childhood identity, or not. Childhoodlessness, being obviously suspect on a résumé, would give birth to an industry providing faux adolescences, expensively retro-inserted, the creation of which would gainfully employ a great many writers of fiction. So there would be a silver lining of sorts.

    To be sure, I don’t find this a very realistic idea, however much the prospect of millions of people living out their lives in individual witness protection programs, prisoners of their own youthful folly, appeals to my novelistic Kafka glands. Nor do I take much comfort in the thought that Google itself would have to be trusted never to link one’s sober adulthood to one’s wild youth, which surely the search engine, wielding as yet unimagined tools of transparency, eventually could and would do.

    I imagine that those who are indiscreet on the Web will continue to have to make the best of it, while sharper cookies, pocketing nyms and proxy cascades (as sharper cookies already do), slouch toward an ever more Googleable future, one in which Google, to some even greater extent than it does now, helps us decide what we’ll do next.


    William Gibson is the author of the forthcoming novel “Zero History.”
    http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/01/op...ef=todayspaper

    I don't think I fully agree with everything he says, but I thought it was interesting enough to share...

  2. #2
    The fundamental problem with that extended metaphor is that it is mislabeled. It doesn't really work with Google. It does work with the Internet in general. Google is one of those discrete entities the way he says we imagined them.
    Last night as I lay in bed, looking up at the stars, I thought, “Where the hell is my ceiling?"

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    "Science fiction never imagined Google"

    When people moan about Google, sometimes I picture is as Jobe from the Lawnmower Man films, especially Lawnmower Man 2.

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    If Google were sufficiently concerned about this, perhaps the company should issue children with free “training wheels” identities at birth, terminating at the age of majority. One could then either opt to connect one’s adult identity to one’s childhood identity, or not. Childhoodlessness, being obviously suspect on a résumé, would give birth to an industry providing faux adolescences, expensively retro-inserted, the creation of which would gainfully employ a great many writers of fiction. So there would be a silver lining of sorts.

    To be sure, I don’t find this a very realistic idea, however much the prospect of millions of people living out their lives in individual witness protection programs, prisoners of their own youthful folly, appeals to my novelistic Kafka glands. Nor do I take much comfort in the thought that Google itself would have to be trusted never to link one’s sober adulthood to one’s wild youth, which surely the search engine, wielding as yet unimagined tools of transparency, eventually could and would do.
    Training wheels

    There are advantages to being older than the internet. My youth is protected, cordoned off from my adult life, no amount of data mining can change that. That's probably why I've avoided those social network sites where people post their life history, complete with baby pictures, videos of college party days....and links to links of their other links in life. I've never trusted digital data sharing much to begin with, especially where my kids are concerned. Maybe one day they'll thank me for keeping their childhoods private, not plastering their pictures and identities all over Facebook or whatever, as many parents do. If they choose to do it themselves, they'll just have to learn how to deal with the good/bad/ugly. It's kind of like concentric circles of sex---you sleep with everyone they ever slept with---there's always a trail.

  5. #5
    Quote Originally Posted by GGT View Post
    where my kids are concerned ... you sleep with everyone they ever slept with---there's always a trail.

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    Why the eek? Should I edit my post so you understand it better? [Internet links ~ sexual links]

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  8. #8
    Quote Originally Posted by RandBlade View Post
    I was just joking.
    Sorry, I didn't pick up on the humor.

    I hope/think my kids picked up on the seriousNess plus the humor of the internet, and sex too. My kid has a black t-shirt with bold white letters across the chest, "Didn't I see a naked picture of you on the internet?" He can't wear it to school because of their dress code, but he likes to wear it in public on weekends. He also announced he won't be getting a Facebook account any time soon, because there's been too much damn drama between the middle school and high school students, and even their teachers.

    Peyton Place for the 21st century.

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    Heh, what? The start of that post was true and nicely put. Sadly i thought he had a point. However, equally sadly, ive reached the end of my wine, which may also have contributed to the misunderstanding...
    "Son," he said without preamble, "never trust a man who doesn't drink, because he's probably a self-righteous sort, a man who thinks he knows right from wrong all the time. Some of them are good men, but in the name of goodness, they cause most of the suffering in the world. They're the judges, the meddlers. And, son, never trust a man who drinks but refuses to get drunk. They're usually afraid of something deep down inside, either that they're a coward or a fool or mean and violent. You can't trust a man who's afraid of himself. But sometimes, son, you can trust a man who occasionally kneels before a toilet. The chances are that he is learning something about humility and his natural human foolishness, about how to survive himself. It's damned hard for a man to take himself too seriously when he's heaving his guts into a dirty toilet bowl.

  10. #10
    Seems like a lot of hyperbolizing based on a CEO's lazy/impolitic language.

    At the most basic and broad, Google is a box. What you get from that box depends on what you put in. Using the box is not any more mandatory than using Facebook. I'm honestly more surprised that a guy like William Gibson finds this so intellectually difficult to grapple with.

  11. #11
    Continuing the idea of Google telling people what to do next, anyone try google instant yet? Its a neat idea that shaves off the precious seconds you would have wasted if you had to finish typing in that quote you were looking for, but its coming off as very distracting, and (as usual), its naughty word list is a little odd. I don't look at the keyboard while typing, and I barely keep my eyes on the screen, so having the screen constantly reloading and flashing messes with head.
    Not to mention something like this will take the wikipedia effect to a whole new level.

    but some words it doesn't "instant" like penis and vagina.
    yet other words it does, like breast and nipple
    Last edited by Ominous Gamer; 09-09-2010 at 06:05 PM.

  12. #12
    I thought it would be annoying, haven't bothered to try it out yet.

    I use Bing for all my searching needs - I quickly got to where I find it much more user-friendly than Google.
    We're stuck in a bloody snowglobe.

  13. #13
    I generally search with the Google searchbar in Firefox anyway, but yes I tried Google Instant once only for the sake of it and really disliked it, it is very distracting.

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    I go between liking it and not liking it. But in particular I like that they are willing to take risks and re-think things.

    I imagine this is sucking up some huge server resources. Just imagine a large segment of their userbase effectively performing many multiples of searches every time they visit the site.

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