The googlization of ever.., p.25
The Googlization of Everything, page 25
Our current information ecosystem is a tangled thicket, consisting of bound, stable, localized, and hierarchical outlets such as old university libraries, commercial publishers, and states; amateur-driven and thus unstable projects such as Wikipedia and blogs; and hypercommercialized, data-mined, advertising-directed platforms such as Google. The post-Google agenda of the Human Knowledge Project would be committed to outlining the values and processes necessary to establish and preserve a truly universal, fundamentally democratic global knowledge ecosystem and public sphere.
I foresee public libraries as the nodes of the Human Knowledge Project. Because libraries are increasingly the places where poor people seek knowledge and opportunity via the Internet, we should take advantage of them to connect people with knowledge in the richest and most effective ways possible. In addition, if we rapidly increase funding for libraries around the world, they will spend more on the products that support the public sphere, such as newspapers, magazines, journals, books, videos, recordings, and software. The Human Knowledge Project moves beyond such short-term concerns as how newspapers might become profitable again. And it gets beyond blaming Google, Craigslist, the Huffington Post, and other Web services for the downfall of traditional journalism and publishing. The Human Knowledge Project takes a broad and deep approach in hopes of serving the public’s need for knowledge in the best way possible and fostering a flowering of creativity and civic engagement.
I would like to see a plan to fund and support a global network of libraries, staffed by trained professionals, equipped with durable and flexible technology, open to assist people of every station with their inquiries. There is no “global library system” per se. There is not even a standardized national library system in the United States. However, high standards of professionalism and technologies are upheld by professional schools of library science and information in the United States. To realize this global project, the noncommercialized physical space of public libraries and the high ethical and technical standards of professional librarianship are more needed than ever.
The Human Knowledge Project would consider questions of organization and distribution at every level: the network, the hardware, the software, the protocols, the laws, the staff, the administrators, the physical space (libraries), the formats for discrete works, the formats for reference works such as dictionaries and encyclopedias, the formats for emerging collaborative works, and the spaces to facilitate collaboration and creativity. But the Human Knowledge Project would not be an endeavor to crowd out the private sector, any more than the private sector should be allowed to crowd out the Human Knowledge Project. Collaboration with and respect for commercial publishers and distributors would be essential for the maintenance and extension of collections. We should not get locked into the idea that we must protect or preserve any particular firm or industry. We should generate a fertile environment for new ideas to grow, whether commercial, artistic, or scientific.
The idea for the Human Knowledge Project was explicitly inspired by the Human Genome Project. Its story should sound familiar. In the early 1980s, a small group of molecular biologists, led by Robert Sinsheimer of the University of California at Santa Cruz, envisioned a large project that would be the biological equivalent of astronomy’s Hubble Telescope—a project so ambitious in scope that it would open up secrets of the natural world that the classic process of close study of a discrete phenomenon could not. Sinsheimer saw the value of what came to be known as “big science.” The project’s goal was to map the human genome: that is, to identify the location and function of every one of the genes in the human somatic cell. At the time, many scientists assumed that humans have more than 40,000 genes (the number is actually closer to 25,000), so the task seemed quite daunting, perhaps impossible. Using the techniques of the early 1980s, it took several years to determine the genetic sequence of the Epstein-Barr virus, many thousands of times smaller than the human genome. The potential boon of such a database, however, generated sufficient enthusiasm among leading scientists that they were able to generate funding and support for the project.
Still, efforts to sequence the human genome were sporadic, disorganized, uncoordinated across borders, and technologically rudimentary during the first decade of the project. Researchers in Japan, France, and the United Kingdom were pursuing similar projects, but no one had forged a global vision for an open database of information. By the early 1990s researchers such as John Sulston in the United Kingdom had refined some sequencing techniques, making it conceivable that the various researchers could generate a human genome map within a few decades. Enthusiasm grew.5
Then an audacious, confident, technologically savvy private actor stepped in and offered to do the job for free—or at least without public funding. Celera, led by the maverick biologist Craig Venter, made promises not unlike Google’s: faster, cheaper, better-focused results, with only modest limitations on public access to the data. While earlier working for the public project, by 1990 Venter and his research partner, Mark Adams, had developed a new technique, called expressed sequence tagging, that let them identify genes rapidly. Venter claimed that this new approach “was a bargain in comparison to the genome project” and claimed he could find up to 90 percent of human genes within a few years for a fraction of the cost.6
The leader of the Human Genome Project at the time, James Watson, grew enraged when National Institutes of Health officials expressed excitement over Venter’s techniques, which Watson saw not only as a cheapening of the mission but also as a route toward the privatization of information. The NIH had already begun securing patents on many of Venter’s discoveries. Watson and others considered these actions to be a grave violation of scientific principles because patents could be used to prevent future researchers from sharing knowledge generated by the project. Watson left the project over this dispute. Venter left as well, to found Celera Genomics in 1998 and pursue the privatization of the human genome.
Working with researchers at the Johns Hopkins University, Venter generated another revolutionary technique that sped up the process—whole-genome “shotgun” sequencing. This development generated much debate within the sequencing community, with the new director of the NIH, Francis Collins, arguing for the slow, complete, and more scientifically meaningful approach and others, such as Sulston, pleading to adopt some of Venter’s techniques.
The result was that the public project raised its metabolism, adopted new techniques to generate faster results, and increased its funding by rallying public support and invoking concerns about Venter’s potential privatization of the data. When Venter declared that Celera could sequence the entire genome within three years, Collins responded by declaring that the Human Genome Project would produce a “rough draft” of the genome within five years. Researchers around the world began coordinating their research and results so that the knowledge of the human genome would belong to the entire species. Ultimately, by late 2000, both the public and the private projects were ready to publish their results, but in different journals and under different terms of access and use. Since that publication, research on the genome and on particular genes continues, all the better for the competition and the expression of political will by some of the most important scientists in the world.7
In the aftermath of the race to sequence the human genome, Francis Collins and his colleagues reflected on the lessons they had learned from conducting a grand, global project in the public interest and competing against a high-powered and ambitious private firm. Collins concluded that the keys to success include building teams led by committed and diverse professionals, keeping focused on both the incremental advances and the long-term goal, managing well, establishing and respecting explicit milestones, publishing results quickly, deploying the best technology, and collaborating well with the private sector.8 In this last factor, Collins and the Human Genome Project failed: they never reached a workable agreement with Celera. But because they exceeded their own expectations, the Human Genome Project succeeded spectacularly nonetheless.
The Human Knowledge Project should encourage private interests such as Google, news organizations, textbook publishers, and scientific organizations to be players in the design and execution of this system. Financial incentives must remain strong, or too few institutions will be willing to take risks to generate new knowledge. However, the goal is not to enrich any particular firm.
The goal of the Human Knowledge Project is to enrich the range of opportunities for knowledge exploitation and to foster creativity and innovation in ways we cannot predict. The only way we are going to accomplish such a long-term project is to mount a political movement for it. If we want to create a vital global public sphere for the digital era by offering the best and the most information to the largest number of people around the world, we will have to make a persuasive case for such a goal. We will have to identify the costs and impediments and confront them directly. We will have to articulate the need and the benefits. We will have to change minds. We will have to change laws. We can’t just hope that some big, rich company will do it for us. That’s simply irresponsible.
The problem with the Googlization of everything is that we count on Google too much. We trust it too much. We have blind faith in its ability to solve grand problems with invisible technologies. Its stumbles in the Google Books project have already tarnished its aura of invincibility. We have seen how Google’s efforts to globalize have met with fierce resistance in places that do not share Google’s ideologies. Bad copyright laws have not only prevented other firms and institutions from contributing to the global information ecosystem, but they have also impaired Google’s ability to serve us better. And we have seen how Google has played its corporate-responsibility card to deflect attention from troubling actions it takes. Meanwhile, Google is developing more powerful tools to help us shop, without considering that shopping and learning don’t always rely on the same standards and practices. Now we must demand more. We must build systems that can serve us better, regardless of which companies and technologies thrive in the next decade. Most important, we should learn to beware of false idols and empty promises. The future of knowledge—and thus the future of the species—depends on getting this right.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
The words of Thorstein Veblen sounded in my head as I researched and composed this book. Believe me: that was daunting and weird. I kept saying to myself as I wrote, “What would Veblen think of this?” The summer before I proposed doing a book on Google, I tried to read everything Veblen ever published. In a strange way, this whole project emerged from that experiment. I am convinced that we ignore Veblen at our peril. So this book is an exercise in trying to revive his critical spirit and demonstrate that it can do us much good here at the dawn of the twenty-first century. During the four years that I worked on this book, I resisted the urge to consider my constant connectivity either natural or regular. I focused on how odd it all was and how differently I lived not so long ago. I tried to acknowledge the weirdness of living la vida Google.
This book is about living with Google and thinking through Google. To explore these questions, instead of boycotting or living outside Google, I went all in. I spent as much time as possible reading Google’s public blogs, talking with people who work there, listening to folks who use it every day, and trying out as many Google services as I was qualified to use. I began using Gmail for e-mail and Google Docs for collaborative writing projects and for presentations in the courses I taught. I joined Orkut (Google’s social networking platform, popular in India and Brazil but less so in the United States) and even uploaded my medical records to Google Health, an online repository. For more than four years, I lived every day with and through as many Google products and services as I could. For several weeks, I tried to write this book using Google Docs instead of my default word processing program.
This book would not exist without the cooperation of the people who work at Google and YouTube: in particular, Peter Barron, Dan Clancy, Vint Cerf, Hal Varian, Alex Macgillivray, Glenn Otis Brown, and Jennie Johnson. They welcomed me on several visits, gave me their valuable time, and tolerated my mistakes and overstatements as I presented draft sections of the book on my blog, Googlizationofeverything.com. Most important, they have produced some astounding products that I have used extensively in the research and composition of all my work, not just this book. Google has made my life better and richer.
Bob Stein, Dan Visel, and Ben Vershbow of the Institute for the Future of the Book were early champions of this project and made sure the blog was hosted well and received more attention than perhaps it deserved.
My agent and friend Sam Stoloff talked me through the process of pitching the proposal and selling a complex bundle of rights to various publishers around the world. And when things looked bad, Sam calmly pushed me to make it good and get it done. I can’t thank him enough. Bud Bynack, a talented editor helped me forge this into a real book.
The book also benefited from the wisdom and patience of Naomi Schneider of the University of California Press in Berkeley, who saw promise in this project early and endured many false starts. I hope this book lives up to her high expectations.
I worked with two brilliant research assistants in the composition of this work. Alice Marwick is destined to be one of the most important scholars of media in this new century. She has an unparalleled work ethic and an inspiring sense of curiosity. Her critical sensibilities are refined far beyond her years. Sarah Walch is a research librarian of the highest order. She put in many hours helping me refine my thoughts and digging up essential resources for this work. Sarah, who was living and working in Northern California at the time, became my eyes and ears on the fertile ground of Silicon Valley. Most important, Sarah cheered me up and kept me focused at some important points in the research and composition of this book.
Karen Winkler, an editor with the Chronicle Review section of the Chronicle of Higher Education, played a major role in the development of this book. She encouraged me to write a long article for her about the risks universities were taking by enabling Google Books. That article generated a lot of attention for me and helped secure the contracts for this book. Michael Wann, technology and science editor at MSNBC.com, invited me to write columns on the Web 2.0 phenomenon for the site. Many of those ideas made it into this work. Michael’s encouragement and enthusiasm, and the friendship born during our days together scraping by as underpaid Austin journalists, will always sustain me.
This book could not have been written without the generous support of the University of Virginia, where the curiosity and liberalism of Thomas Jefferson still fills the air. Three deans of the College of Arts and Sciences demonstrated their strong support for my work: Edward Ayers, Karen Ryan, and Meredith Woo. Dean Paul Mahoney and Associate Deans Jim Ryan and Liz Magill of the University of Virginia School of Law also supported me. I owe special thanks to Dotan Oliar, Chris Sprigman, Tom Nachbar, and my students at the law school for all their patience and feedback. My colleagues in the Department of Media Studies—Andrea Press, Bruce Williams, Johanna Drucker, Aniko Bodrokhozy, David Golumbia, Hector Amaya, and Jennifer Petersen—ensured that the department would support me in every conceivable way. Bruce Williams read the manuscript in its entirety and offered much advice that improved it greatly. And Judy McPeak made everything run smoothly. Also at Virginia, Chad Wellmon deserves special thanks for pushing me to think harder about the role of knowledge taxonomy through history. And Deborah Johnson inspired me to think more about the effects of design on privacy and transparency.
This book also owes its existence to the generous support that the Verklin family has given to the Department of Media Studies at the University of Virginia. Several important internal grants helped me conduct research trips and paid for other costs incurred in the completion of the book.
Legal scholars who have helped me work through this material include Randy Picker, Michael Madison, Ann Bartow, Lawrence Lessig, Yochai Benkler, Mark Lemley, Pamela Samuelson, Mahadevi Sundar, Chris Sprigman, Julie Cohen, Molly Van Howeling, Lolly Gasaway, Anupam Chander, Shubha Ghosh, Mike Godwin, and Tim Wu. Neil Netanel and David Nimmer gave me an opportunity to outline my perspectives on Google for their seminar at UCLA Law School. Their students gave me valuable feedback on a draft of part of this book. Oren Bracha did me the great favor of bringing me back to my alma mater, the University of Texas at Austin, to speak about Google Books in its early days. Cass Sunstein assured me I was on the right track with my approach. Frank Pasquale went above and beyond the duties of friendship by engaging with me in conversation on the various blogs to which he contributes about the many facets of Google. Andrew Chin, my dear friend since our early undergraduate years at the University of Texas, read the entire manuscript and helped me avoid some serious mistakes.
The two people who taught me the most about search engines and prompted me to think broadly about how Google affects the world are Helen Nissenbaum of New York University and Michael Zimmer of the University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee. Either of them could have written this book better than I have. I am grateful for their generosity in sharing their ideas, observations, and expertise while I muscled in on their territory. Two wonderful computer scientists, Hal Abelson of MIT and Harry Lewis of Harvard, taught me a tremendous amount about the history and major tenets of their field. Jim Jansen of Penn State University walked me through the growing body of social science on search-engine use. The great danah boyd fed me insights about our shifting conceptions of privacy. Chris Soghoian talked me through technical issues of surveillance and security. Ted Striphas taught me much about the role of books in the twenty-first century. Liz Losh helped me understand the relationship between the state and electronic media. Eszter Hargittai gave me great advice on everything. And Fred Turner shared his brilliant insights into the cultural history of Silicon Valley. Over in Amsterdam, Geert Lovink and Richard Rogers gave me frequent tips and insights into how Google does things in Europe, and they invited me twice to present my work at wonderful conferences in my favorite European city. Konrad Becker in Vienna was also a great help by coordinating global work on search engines for his conferences and published collections. And Lawrence Liang in Bangalore remains a dear friend and inspiration.
