How Google Works

We will offer you multiple platforms to publish. We will then stealthy crawl and index the most popular information and suggest the advertising modules to place by the side of your work. We will then sell the ads and give you a 5% cut (no one knows for sure, one of Google’s top secrets) for your own work. Because it takes too long to actually write and publish an interesting, creative content we will encourage aggregation, embeds and outright stealing (repackaging and relabeling) of the creative work, to the point that majority of the internet are the scraped splogs (spam blogs) and the content feeds. We will send you SEO (search engine optimization) signals on how to please and worship us, your master.

We would link all the available content and display the links with the ads. If you are a creative writer or an artist you are at a systemic disadvantage to the aggregation. Nowhere in our business plan is there a place for the direct reimbursement of the creative class, they must be reduced to selling tee shirts for the ugly fat stomach women alongside their silly poetry. And yes we will scan and link every book known to man.

We will then give you the tools for email, chat, calendar, video, etc.. This will enable us to spy on your habits and tastes even in your sleep (we might even monitor your emails when you are already dead). After we invade every crevice of your psyche we will use the computational power (the green energy of course) to increase your clicking ratios. Unlimited financial resources at our disposal will enable us to crash or buyout every innovation that threatens to disrupt our model.

Finally because nothing scales as fast as crap we will rank the most popular content that aims to sink to the lowest common denominator and to appeal to the masses of the Generation Like!!! and the Generation LOL!!!

We will then go to China and complain about the lack of democracy and the
“free information”.

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And just to underline the above is a quote from the comment by Jaron Lanier to the conversation between Evgeny Morozov and Clay Shirky on the Edge (worthy of reading in the entirety):

“Here is what I wish Hillary Clinton had said to the Chinese after they hacked into Google’s computers: “Of course we need to stop hacking into each other’s computers. But let’s keep our eyes on the bigger picture: The world we want to live in would also happen to be the best world for China’s vital interests. We want to live in a world in which a Chinese movie routinely earns billions of dollars in the USA from intellectual property rights. China needs this world because eventually cheap robotics and other technologies will put pressure on the margins China can earn from manufacturing. We want to live in a world in which both Chinese citizens and Americans can often earn their livings from their hearts and brains, instead of their hands. We want them to use the Internet to do that, and that means we have to stop using the ‘Net the way we are, primarily as a way to gather data. Both the Chinese government and Google ought to change their approaches in order to bring about this world.”

You can read there also Douglas Rushkoff’s comments and it doesn’t really come close to the depth of Jaron Lanier. Take this profound thought as an example. The binary architecture expressed on the surface of the media:

“The basic problem is that web 2.0 tools are not supportive of democracy by design. They are tools designed to gather spy-agency-like data in a seductive way, first and foremost, but as a side effect they tend to provide software support for mob-like phenomena. There are some nice mob effects, but the intensity of the failures is more profound than the delights of the successes. A flash mob in San Francisco in which people suddenly hold a pose and disperse doesn’t compensate for a flash mob in Philadelphia in which people are beaten up.

In the USA, the rise of these tools has corresponded to a truly loony period of reality disconnect and rancor. When you bring digital tools into a system in a crude way, you risk infecting elements of that system with a binary character. Either you’re all in or you’re all out. Each politician becomes a bit.”

image via flickr/zaruka

Tagged as: business, creative class, douglas rushkoff, google, internet, jaron lanier, politics, recession, writer