So have we learned anything at all from this financial debacle? There are some entities that are too big to fail, ergo, too big to exist. I ask this question naively, but what if?
Google’s share price is currently 360 or so, down from it’s all time high of double that a couple years ago. I don’t know if this reflects a realistic market value for this company, whether speculation is to blame, or flying monkeys. What I do understand is that we have put a lot of faith in Google as reflected in this valuation, and as a result they get to operate with a lot of capital. So what are they doing with all that capital?
I think our understanding of the “internet” is to a large extent now Google’s representation of the internet, and the degree to which the two are entwined suggests to me a kind of transference. In that the internet is this nebulous, always-on, too large to consider interconnected web, a kind of entity, we have imbued Google with similar characteristics. But like the Wizard of Oz, Google is just a software company, or perhaps a technology company, since they never actually “ship” software, only endless beta’s.
And like the Human Genome Project, which may be selling you your own DNA cure for cancer some day, Google has undertaken a mass effort to catalogue “everything” in print. Right now there is a minor dustup over out-of-print titles that they in a sense “own” since they have done the grunt work of scanning them. But what if?
What if we let Google digest everything? What are the consequences of having “everything” available. And what are the consequences of having everything available easily, free, and controlled by one company?
What if Google goes out of business? What happens to all that information? What if they get too big?
This would have sounded silly if it were not a fact that we have seen and will see the demise of several Wall Street Investment banks, a number of very large commercial banks, and two thirds of the US auto industry. All within a year. Masters of the Universe no more.
So it is not silly to ask, what if?
And anyway, do we really want one company in control of that much published work?
(right now you can search all of New York Magazine’s back issues to 1997, conveniently when I started working for them, and you can see all the shitty pictures I took by searching my name…the blessing at the time was, “its only on the newsstand for a week!” OY!)
Despite their mantra to do no evil, Google has destroyed things simply by its existence. Online advertising is one thing that Google, with it’s adsense, has made ubiquitous, cheap, and irrelevant. Do you look at Google ads? Me neither. Yet their presence brings the value of other ads down, and makes them less effective. Adsense is the muzak of the internet. You hardly know it’s there. But it is one reason in my opinion that magazines and newspapers have not been able to generate sufficient revenue from their online ads. Please correct me, or point me to another analysis if this is way out. But I don’t think it’s that far off base.
So I ask, by cataloguing most of human written knowledge, could they destroy its value somehow? Is there a value in things not being explicit, easy to find, simple? How do our tools shape our thoughts?
You raise some good points – related to photography what is strange is the way that, despite all the incredible things Google has built in searching and archiving, using their services it’s still very common for a photograph to be completely separated from the name of the photographer (never mind rights).
In terms of your discussion of advertising and editorial, it brought to mind this great post on the same subject. Particularly point #2.
Thanks for that link. What it makes me think is that we all pay for Google’s “beta-mind” to borrow a phrase from Anil.
Imagine if Microsoft only shipped experimental operating systems for us to evaluate and try, in real working environments. And the final release never came along. It was just supplemented by another beta product that did something else. This is sort of what he is getting at also.
I like his analysis of how clicks have been converted to economic exchange which cannot be separated from informational exchange. And at the same time, the basic value of that click approaches zero. Paradoxical.