The Googlization of Everything. Siva Vaidhyanathan
perceptions. Does anything (or anyone) matter if it (or she) does not show up on the first page of a Google search?
Here are some of the big questions facing us in the coming years: Who—if not Google—will control, judge, rank, filter, and deliver to us essential information? What is the nature of the transaction between Google’s computer algorithms and its millions of human users? How have people been using Google to enhance their lives? Is it the best possible starting point (or end point) for information seeking? What is the future of expertise in an age dominated by Google, bloggers, and Wikipedia? Are we headed down the path toward a more enlightened age and enriching global economy, or are we approaching a dystopia of social control and surveillance?
IMAGINEERING GOOGLIZATION
This book employs what I call a “technocultural imagination.”13 A person who relies on a technocultural imagination asks these sorts of questions: Which members of a society get to decide which technologies are developed, bought, sold, and used? What sorts of historical factors influence why one technology “succeeds” and another fails? What are the cultural and economic assumptions that influence the ways a technology works in the world, and what unintended consequences can arise from such assumptions? Technology studies in general tend to address several core questions about technology and its effects on society (and vice versa): To what extent do technologies guide, influence, or determine history? To what extent do social conditions and phenomena mold technologies? Do technologies spark revolutions, or do concepts like revolution raise expectations and levels of effects of technologies?
The chapters that follow attempt to answer such questions. The first two chapters explore the moral universe of Google and its users. I don’t really care if Google commits good or evil. In fact, as I explain below, the slogan “Don’t be evil” distracts us from carefully examining the effects of Google’s presence and activity in our lives. The first chapter argues that we must consider the extent to which Google regulates the Web, and thus the extent to which we have relinquished that duty to one company. The company itself takes a technocratic approach to any larger ethical and social questions in its way. It is run by and for engineers, after all. Every potential problem is either a bug in the system, yet to be fixed, or a feature in its efforts to provide better service. This attitude masks the fact that Google is not a neutral tool or a nondistorting lens: it is an actor and a stakeholder in itself. And, more important, as a publicly traded company, it must act in its shareholders’ short-term interests, despite its altruistic proclamations. More important yet, Google is changing. Each week brings a new initiative, a new focus (or a new distraction) for the company, and a new enemy or challenge. Such rapid changes, and the imperatives of corporate existence, are the subjects of chapter 2.
One of the great attractions of Google is that it appears to offer so many powerful services for free—that is, for no remuneration.14 But there is an implicit nonmonetary transaction between Google and its users. Google gives us Web search, e-mail, Blogger platforms, and YouTube videos. In return, Google gets information about our habits and predilections so that it can more efficiently target advertisements at us. Google’s core business is consumer profiling. It generates dossiers on many of us. It stores “cookies” in our Web browsers to track our clicks and curiosities. Yet we have no idea how substantial or accurate these digital portraits are. This book generates a fuller picture of what is at stake in this apparently costless transaction and a new account of surveillance that goes beyond the now-trite Panopticon model. Google is a black box. It knows a tremendous about us, and we know far too little about it. The third chapter explains how we fail to manage the flows of our personal information and how Google fails to make the nature of the transaction clear and explicit.
Google is simultaneously very American in its ideologies and explicitly global in its vision and orientation. That’s not unusual for successful multinational corporations. Microsoft is just as important a cultural and economic force in India as it is in the United States. Google, however, explicitly structures and ranks knowledge with a universal vision for itself and its activities. This comprehensiveness generates a tremendous amount of friction around the world—not least in the People’s Republic of China. Between 2005 and 2010 the Chinese government regularly shut down portions of Google’s services because the company just barely managed to remain in the good graces of the Communist Party. Yet for all its deftness in dealing with China, Google for years drew criticism from global human rights groups for being part of the problem, rather than part of the solution, in China. Then, in early 2010, the company surprised the world by giving the Chinese government exactly what it wanted: Google shut down its Chinese-based search engine while leaving intact those portions of its business that supply jobs and revenue to Chinese nationals. This move left Chinese Internet users with fewer sources of information, did nothing to reduce the stifling level of censorship, and put government-backed search engines in firm control of the Web in China. This was an empty and counterproductive gesture. By choosing to be a passive, rather than active, partner in Chinese censorship, somehow the company drew applause from human rights organizations. The fourth chapter covers the trials of Google as it has tried to apply a single vision of information commerce to a wide array of cultural and political contexts across the globe.
In chapters 5 and 6 the book considers the consequences of Google’s official mission statement: “To organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible.” In chapter 5 I assess the controversial Google Books program. This program, launched in 2004, was meant to help fulfill the mission of organizing the world’s information, but it served several engineering and commercial goals as well. The audacity of the program, which aimed to copy millions of copyrighted books from university libraries and offer them in low-quality formats to a broad market of readers, was the first case in which Google clearly moved beyond its previously venerated status. Because of the mistakes Google made in the Books program, federal regulators and many important segments of the reading public grew concerned with the scope of Google’s ambitions.15
In the public mind, Google’s informal motto, “Don’t be evil,” resonates more than its formal mission statement. But the mission statement is far more interesting. It is a stunning statement. What other institution would define changing the world as its unifying task? The Web-using public has adopted Google services at an astounding rate, and Google has expanded to master widely used Internet functions such as Web search, e-mail, personal “cloud computing,” and online advertising. Chapter 6 and the conclusion consider how Google is changing and challenging both the technologies and the companies that govern human communication. The book concludes with a call for more explicitly public governance of the Internet. Such governance might take the form of greater privacy guarantees for Web users or strong antitrust scrutiny of companies like Google. The particular forms and instruments of governance are not as important as the general idea that what Google does is too important to be left to one company. But any criticisms and calls for regulation should be tempered with an honest and full account of Google’s remarkable and largely beneficial contributions to our lives. Google figured out how to manage abundance while every other media company in the world was trying to manufacture scarcity, and for that we should be grateful.
As I finished this book, it seemed that the instruments that traditionally supply knowledge for public deliberation were collapsing all around us. Newspapers in the United States and Europe were closing at a startling rate. Many newspaper leaders blamed Google because it alone seemed to be making money. Book publishers were also panicking, as readers suffering from a recession steadily held back their disposable cash, and moves by Amazon, Apple, and Google to serve as cheap-book vendors generated as much anxiety as opportunity. After weighing the various claims and arguments about the fate of journalism and publishing during a crippling global recession, I conclude that we should invest heavily in a global library of digital knowledge, with universal access and maximum freedoms of use. This proposal does not entail a simple bailout or subsidy to any industry or institution. It means that we should embark on a global, long-term plan to enhance