The googlization of ever.., p.7
The Googlization of Everything, page 7
The areas in which Google has faced the strongest protest worldwide just happen to be those ventures in which Google has the greatest responsibility for content, what I call “scan and serve.” In these activities, Google scours the real world, renders real things into digital form, and offers them as part of the Google experience. The two best examples are Google Books, which has generated objections and lawsuits from authors and publishers around the world, and Google Street View, which has sparked actual street protests and government actions. In Street View, Google staff take cameras out around the globe to capture images of specific locations that can be used to enhance Google’s services, such as its map feature. In doing so, Google’s cameras also capture images of individuals and their property. In this case, Google bears great responsibility for creating the digital content as well as hosting and delivering it to Web users. And thus these actions justify the highest level of regulatory scrutiny.
Although its various services thus incur differing levels of responsibility, Google insists on being regulated at the lowest level, specifying a one-size-fits-all prescription to regulate its complex interactions with real human beings and their diverse needs. In response to every single complaint about its behavior, Google officials answer that they are happy to take down offensive or troublesome content if someone merely takes the initiative to inform the company. It does not want to be held responsible for policing its own collections, even those collections that would not exist at all if Google did not aggregate or create them. Through its remarkable cultural power, Google has managed to keep much regulatory action at bay around the world.
In fact, Google seems poised to try to mold regulations in its favor in several important areas. In the United States there are signs that the current government has established a close relationship with Google.
During his presidential campaign in 2008, Barack Obama made it clear that he has strong ties with Google’s leaders, employees, and technologies. Obama visited Google headquarters in the summer of 2004 and again in November 2007, when he announced his “innovation agenda.”68 Most of Obama’s campaign speeches were released on YouTube. Eric Schmidt endorsed Obama and traveled with him in the fall of 2008. Once elected, Obama’s transition team continued to use YouTube as its video platform of choice for reaching a broad audience. This relationship raised many questions and criticisms by privacy and consumer advocates, because Obama seemed to favor the Google-sponsored platform over other commercial sites or open-source alternatives. All of this occurred just as Google came under intense scrutiny for its data-retention policies and the extent to which it controls the market in Web advertising. Having a close friend in the White House could make a difference if Google gets into trouble with either U.S. or European officials.69
Another troubling example occurred in the summer of 2010, when Google abandoned its long-standing pledge to support open, nondiscriminatory, “neutral” digital communication networks in the United States. In July, the U.S. Federal Communications Commission failed to forge a compromise between Internet companies that support a “neutral” Internet and telecommunications companies, such as Comcast and AT&T, that would like to control the speeds at which certain data flows over their segments of the networks. Google stepped in where regulators had stalled to forge an agreement with Verizon in hopes of establishing a template for policy—or at least a framework for private agreements among firms. The result was that Google continued to claim it stood for the public interest—and an open, “classic” Internet—while dealing away significant control over mobile data channels and many future areas of growth. Significantly, Google’s agreement would bar the FCC from making new rules governing data flow over networks, thus effectively privatizing policy.70 All of these developments speak to the complex and changing relationship that Google, the chief regulator of the Web, has with the United States government, one of the chief regulators of commerce around the world.
Over and above these particular ways that Google dominates the nature and function of the World Wide Web, it has a greater, albeit more subtle governance effect.71 Mostly by example, the company manages to spread the “Google way” of doing things. It executes a sort of soft power over not just the content of the Web but also users’ expectations and habits when dealing with it. Google trains us to think as good Googlers, and it influences other companies to mimic or exceed the core techniques and values of Google. In addition, Google’s success at doing what it does enhances and exploits a particular ideology: techno-fundamentalism. This soft-power mode of governance, one that depends so heavily on the blind faith we place in Google, is the subject of the next three chapters.
TWO
GOOGLE’S WAYS AND MEANS
FAITH IN APTITUDE AND TECHNOLOGY
The American comedian Louis C. K. tells a story that illustrates the constant ratcheting up of expectations for newness, “nowness,” speed, and convenience. He was traveling on an airplane in early 2009, C. K. told the television host Conan O’Brien, when the flight attendant announced that his flight offered a new feature that airlines had been working to install for some years: in-flight access to the Internet. “It’s fast and I’m watching YouTube clips,” C. K. said. “It’s amazing. I’m on an airplane! Then it breaks down and they apologize that the Internet is not working. The guy next to me goes, ’Pphhhhhh. This is bullshit.’ Like how quickly the world owes him something he knew existed only 10 seconds ago.”1 C. K.’s point is that when we become habituated to the amazing technological achievements of recent years, we forget to be thrilled and amazed. We lose our sense of wonder. We take brilliance for granted, and so we ignore the human elements of fortitude, creativity, and intelligence that underlie so many tools we use every day. The dynamic of consumer expectations has been running at such high speeds for so many years that we become frustrated with devices and services (such as slow computer processors and Internet access) that did not even exist a few years ago.
This constant, insatiable hunger is sharpened by constant pressure on firms to expand markets and revenue, as well as by a widespread lack of historical perspective on technological change. But at its root is the black box of technological design. Although consumers and citizens are invited to be dazzled by the interface, the results, and the convenience of a technology, they are rarely invited in to view how it works. Because we cannot see inside the box, it’s difficult to appreciate the craft, skill, risk, and brilliance of devices as common as an iPod or a continuously variable transmission in an automobile.
This chapter examines some of the cultural assumptions that underlie the enthusiastic reception of Google and our willingness to trust the company with information about us. First, the chapter examines how we discovered and celebrated Google in its early years and the values that it built on to earn our trust. Then it explores the values that have characterized Google’s practices and people.
Google’s first brilliant innovation was, of course, its search algorithm. Its second was the auction system for placing advertisements, which generates tremendous revenue for the company. But a close third is the way that Google measures us and builds its systems and services to indulge our desires and weaknesses. Google works for us because it seems to read our minds—and, in a way, it does. It guesses what you might want to see based on requests that you and others like you have already expressed. You can type a vague term into the search query box, not knowing exactly how to phrase your desire, and Google will most likely return a remarkably appropriate list of things you might want. Moreover, Google conditions us to accept and believe that that list does in fact deliver what we want. The suggestive power of Google Web Search, made explicit by the drop-down list of choices that appears when we start typing, is the magic that hooks us. In many ways Google has measured and understood us better than we have assessed ourselves.
Google works so well, so simply, and so fast that it inspires trust and faith in its users. As the science fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke famously wrote, “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.”2 And of course trust in magic, or suspension of disbelief, is a central part of the process of embracing the deific. That’s why so much of what we say and write about the experience of Google sounds vaguely religious. It sure looks like magic from this desk chair. I send a string of text out into the ether, and less than a second later the glowing screen in front of me offers a list of answers. It’s not quite an abundance; that would be overwhelming. It’s a manageable set of choices—just enough to give me a sense of autonomy over my next move but not too many to paralyze me. If I am shopping for shoes, there is little spiritual about the process. But if I am searching for connection, affirmation, guidance, even directions, the interactions I have with this semi-intelligent system (and all the intelligent beings to whom it can connect) can verge on the spiritual. If I am seeking something meaningful, Google seems to help me find meaning.
If you are a lonely Muslim boy growing up in Berlin, offended by the spiritual poverty and sexual depravity you perceive around you, then Google can connect you with a community that understands. If you are gay young woman growing up in a suburb of Salt Lake City, Utah, Google could be the first place you go to seek affirmation and advice. If you are a commodities trader in the City of London, you might feel a rush of adrenaline and testosterone as you use Google to sift through business news and rumors. We all Google our various gods, no matter what we worship or how worthy those gods are of our devotion. And now we expect nothing less than a meaningful response. Google’s success is a function of our collective cultural weaknesses, and it in turn encourages them by ratcheting up our expectations.
As Google vice president Marissa Mayer explained during her 2008 keynote speech at a software developers’ conference, one of the most significant things that Google discovered in its early user studies was that speed mattered more than anything else in generating a “positive user experience.” This fact has driven Google to push the Internet industry for faster broadband service, create faster-running Web applications, and invest in an expensive, complicated, and powerful infrastructure to conduct Google’s core activity: copying and searching the World Wide Web. “Users really care about speed,” Mayer told developers. “They respond to speed. As the web gets faster, as Google gets faster, people search more.”3 More searching yields more advertising links displayed, more advertising links clicked, and more revenue for Google’s advertising clients and Google itself. Users clearly reward the speed and the quality of search results.
Under the hood, Google runs an astounding set of machines and brilliant code. Mayer explained that every time someone types a simple query into the empty search box on the blank Google home page, that query fires up between 700 and 1,000 separate computers in several huge data centers around the United States. These computers generate 5 million search results by scanning indexes and previous search queries in a mere .16 seconds.4
To Google users, this amazing process is invisible. Making users wise to its power is not a priority of the company: quite the opposite. “It’s very, very complicated technology, but behind a very simple interface,” Mayer said. “We think that that’s the best way to do things. Our users don’t need to understand how complicated the technology and the development work that happens behind this is. What they do need to understand is that they can just go to a box, type what they want, and get answers.”5
If Google users were to understand or appreciate the scale and complexity of Google’s operation, their expectations for magical results might be tempered, their appreciation for human work and ingenuity bolstered, and their abilities to use the tools enhanced. Such changes would not benefit Google now, as it has bet the future of the company on being bigger, faster, better, and more embedded in the constant collective consciousness of human beings than any commercial firm in history. And by promoting its operations as almost magical, Google is not doing anything wrong. Its apparent omnipresence and omnipotence are merely functions of its abilities to capitalize on our weaknesses and desires, cravings, and curiosities.
Faith in Google is dangerous because it increases our appetite for goods, services, information, amusement, distraction, and efficiency. We are addicted to speed and convenience for the sake of speed and convenience. Google rewards us for our desires for immediate gratification at no apparent cost to us. There is nothing wrong with immediate gratification per se; it’s certainly better than no gratification. Immediacy should not, however, be an end in itself. And providing immediate gratification draped in a cloak of corporate benevolence is bad faith.
THE TECHNO-FUNDAMENTALIST ESCHATOLOGY
Google spreads an eschatological ideology: a belief in fulfillment of prophecy. Those who profess eschatologies are uninterested in origin stories or accounts of miracles: instead, they look ahead. Eschatology is the study of the ultimate destiny of humanity. For Google, that destiny involves the organization and universal accessibility of the world’s information. The road to that destiny is paved with the ideal expressions of techno-fundamentalism. Google believes that the constant application of advanced information technologies—algorithms, computer code, high-speed networks, and massively powerful servers—will solve many, if not all, human problems.
No firm operates independently of the culture in which it operates. Industry does not drive history any more than history drives industry. To grasp the full significance of a particular firm or institution, we must consider its place in culture and society—the work it does and the beliefs that value and enable that work. Google is both a product of early twenty-first-century American culture and an influence on global culture.
LIFE BEFORE GOOGLE
Google may be sui generis, but before Google, a number of search engines competed for business in the field. Each of them conducted indexing and searching a bit differently. Like Google, they all originated from a rich academic field devoted to information coding and retrieval, one that lies at the intersection of computer science, linguistics, and library and information studies. It remains an exciting intellectual field. But the late-1990s market gurus of Silicon Valley did not necessarily see search as the key to riches. They saw it as an ancillary feature designed to hold customers’ attention, along with all the other services and content that crowded pages such as Yahoo and Excite.6 Early news coverage of Google generally folded the company in with other search companies launched around the same time. Rarely did a technology or business journalist declare that there was anything remarkable or distinct about Google, even though the simple act of using it demonstrated Google’s superiority almost instantly.
Business Week first took note of Google in September 1998. In a brief entry about how search engines work and the challenge of assessing the quality of their results, its editors wrote: “There’s another ranking system that may be even better for managers. Google (http://google.stanford.edu/) rates Web sites by the number of other sites linked to them. The rankings, in other words, are determined not by surfers, but by Webmasters who presumably took time to evaluate a site before setting up a link to it. It’s an adaptation of the time-honored practice of assessing scientific papers by the number of citations they’ve gotten in other papers.”7
It’s notable that the link to Google given in that article was within the Stanford University computer system. This is the earliest reference I could find to the search engine that ten years later would dominate the Web experience in most of the world. The Press of Christchurch, New Zealand, mentioned Google as a new idea for Web search in December 1998. By then, the URL already stood alone as www.google.com.8 USA Today also listed Google in a brief about interesting websites in December 1998.9 Business and computer publications with specialized circulations started mentioning Google in mid-1999. The New York Times apparently did not consider Google important enough to write about until its columnist Max Frankel mentioned Google among a list of search engines in November 1999.10
The first serious consideration of Google by the New York Times, the leading American newspaper, was a de facto endorsement by the technology writer Peter Lewis in September 1999. “Until recently my favorite search engines were Hotbot (www.hotbot.com) and Alta Vista (www.altavista.com),” Lewis wrote. “Hotbot is useful for finding popular Web sites, and AltaVista is good at ferreting out obscure information. Alta Vista in particular returns a bazillion potential hits when it is asked to scour the Net for a word or phrase. But the larger the World Wide Web becomes, the more important it becomes for search engines to return fewer results, not more. Few people have time to click through 70,482 query matches hoping that the one they want, the most relevant one, is in there somewhere. The engines not only have to be smarter, but also faster.” Lewis noted that “several search engines introduced recently deserve serious consideration, including the revamped version of MSN.com Search (msn.com), introduced by the Microsoft Network last week, and AOL.com Search (aol.com), to be introduced by America Online next week. But if you are searching for the next generation in search technologies, look for Gurunet and Google.”11
Gurunet did not last long after Lewis wrote about it, and he offered only qualified interest in its methods. He was smitten with Google, however. At the moment when the president of the United States was enmeshed in a tawdry scandal involving sex with a White House intern, Lewis found that Google filtered for relevance effectively enough to avoid pornographic sites when searching for terms such as “Bill Clinton” and, more important, “sex.” As Lewis wrote,
What Google does do, however, is to come up with a list that starts with a guide to marriage and sex, not the long string of pornographic sites that would pop up in the search listings of most other engines. Many disreputable Web site operators attempt to fool search engines by salting their pages with bogus key words in an attempt to lure unsuspecting users. Google does not ogle. Instead, Google determines the relevance or importance of a page in part by measuring how many other sites have links to it. That technique enables Google to rank even those sites that it has not visited. Many Web sites do not allow search engines to catalogue their content, but they may hold the information a searcher wants.
