The Blind Giant (6 page)

Google, by allowing the web itself to do the work of ranking pages – Google’s method begins with letting the number of links to a given site determine how important it is – got around all that, and set itself the task of getting people where they wanted to go as fast as possible, without attempting to detain them for advertising purposes. That efficiency is the core of the Google identity: make it work properly first, then figure out how to make money from it.

That’s not to say that the company didn’t have advertising at its heart from the very beginning, only that the model then in use was weak and ineffectual and they eschewed it in favour of something cleverer and more elegant: targeted ads based on user data, ads which could monitor their own effectiveness and charge by the click – the moment of conversion of ad space to interest – rather than by an arbitrary notion of the number of eyeballs skating across a page. Google abandoned stickiness for helpfulness, for speeding you through to your destination – in exchange for information about, and ultimately the possibility of a degree of control over, that destination.

Google is the more important because its ethos is drawn from and massively influential upon the culture of the Internet itself (though, like the notion of ‘mainstream culture’, that means nothing more than the overlapping of a million unique fragments
of
online subculture). It is the product of that same transformative dream of the early days of digital computing, but has in some ways a clearer understanding of the world and a stronger perception of itself, albeit one that is occasionally strikingly blinkered. Google is unashamedly elitist – you could say ‘meritocratic’ if you prefer – hiring only the best, keeping itself to itself. The company’s mission is to ‘make information accessible’, and this is in its worldview an unchallenged good. At the heart of an intellect- and skill-driven enterprise, which has raised efficiency and fact-based decision-making to a new height, and which despises intangibles and fuzziness and tricks of the human mind such as marketing, there is a single tenet based on faith.

Google is an island in the Net, a green land of massages and wind turbines and great food, where employees are encouraged to develop their own projects and bring them to the world through Google’s own system of godmothering. It is the company which cares about not ‘being evil’, though it is not always able to avoid the pitfalls of commercial need or mission creep, or the annoying greyness of human life which can suck the clarity from Google’s black and white. In many ways it is the model for what a twenty-first-century corporation ought to be: rewarding, protective, collegial, environmentally sound, innovative – and determined to make a moral calculus part of or even central to its decision-making. It is also, ultimately, a faith-based techno-capitalist entity premised on the idea that more access to whatever information exists is better, and that anything which stands in the way of that is old-fashioned and reactionary and should be washed away. This has inevitably brought it into conflict with media content industries which derive income directly from consumers rather than by selling their attention to advertisers – technology writer
James Gleick wrote recently in the
New York Review of Books
that the currency of the Internet is not information but attention – and it
will continue to do so. Google is a feature of the digital landscape, a determinator as well as an indicator of how the Internet culture sees the world.

Google has also been accused of deliberately fostering and profiting from unlawful use of copyright material, and of wrecking the newspaper industry by taking over the ad revenue stream on which that industry somewhat depended and by aggregating the content newspapers were encouraged to put
online free of charge in the 1990s. To some extent, the company seems to recognize its culpability in the fall of newspaper revenues:
Eric Schmidt talked recently about finding ways to pump money into news. Say anything you like about Google, but do not ever imagine that the people who work there are stupid. They are occasionally single-minded, and not immune to error, but they are among the most intelligent people in the world.

In many ways, Google is a microcosm of the Internet as a whole: a force multiplier, a facilitator, an accelerator, a feedback system and a paradigm changer. The start-up incorporated in 1998 by
Larry Page and
Sergey Brin is now the Behemoth of the online world. It has radically reshaped the advertising market, changed the way we get news and weather, and how we navigate. It has been part of the staggering changes in the music industry, and moved into the world of publishing with the attempt to secure a deal to sell books online which was so innovative – and, to some, alarming – that it would have required an Act of Congress to make it possible. Had it gone through, it would have called into question one of the basic tenets of intellectual property on which much of the media, including Google itself, relies.

Where Google treads, the earth shakes.

The fundamental thing about Google, though, often goes unremarked: the Google project has barely begun. Domination of search – and, by extension, of advertising – is a means to an end. Google, at least notionally, views the world not primarily
as a market but as something to be made better. Money, Eric Schmidt once remarked, is just a technology to help do that. It’s an oft-quoted maxim of the company’s founders that you can’t change the users, so you have to change the system, but in fact the goal of Google is exactly that: to educate, to liberate, to inform and to uplift. Ultimately, to
improve
us all. Its founders candidly envisage a world where Google and the Internet are fed directly into the brain; where to wonder something can be to know the answer; where humanity is so thoroughly blended with its own technology that it’s hard to see where one ends and the other begins.

This kind of dream is precisely where many people stop paying attention: it sounds too far-fetched to be serious. But you cannot hope to understand Google or the world which is being formed around you unless you are prepared to contemplate this kind of possibility and to grasp that it isn’t metaphor, and it isn’t
a priori
impossible. It’s a technical and an engineering challenge, and research that could bring it about is under way – and in some cases quite far advanced – all over the world. Do not dismiss the notion as fanciful or laughable. It is neither, and the time to ask whether it’s a good idea as well as a fascinating one is now.

More mundanely, in the words of
Douglas Edwards, author of
I’m Feeling Lucky: The Confessions of Google Employee Number 59:

The dream is Napoleonic, even Messianic. And a faith in that goal is part of the culture. Google is exceptional (genuinely, in
many ways it’s the template of the kind of company we should beg to have more of). Like the country that nurtured it, it feels it has a special place in the world – and occasionally finds that the rest of the world receives its painful yet well-intended interventions with less than wholehearted cheer.

That perception of exceptional status seems to lead to a kind of blindness or indifference, too. Edwards also tells us that
Larry Page thinks frequent flier programmes are evil. Why? ‘They incentivise people to take flights that are not the most direct or the cheapest, just so they can earn points.’ In other words, frequent flier programmes damage the consumer’s ability to assess which flight is the best for them. They mess with the flow of information in the system, corrupt the user’s ability to understand what is the best deal. Which to me makes them a lot like cross-subsidized revenues: services such as Google’s core search function, which are free at the point of use but take payment elsewhere in a way which is not obvious to the consumer.

So the corporate DNA of Google is in the first instance transformative. It seeks to make everything more efficient and simpler. The practical consequence of this is the cutting out of the conventional middleman – known these days by the more technical-sounding term ‘
disintermediation’. Google comes into a market, disintermediates someone, and connects the supplier directly – well, through Google – with the customer. On the face of it, that must be a good thing for everyone; or, at least, anyone whose job does not depend on being a middleman. In reality, the fallible, messy human systems known as culture have often grown up around inefficient and unnecessarily complex ways of doing business. Google’s Gordian solutions are not always welcome or even necessarily positive. In the long term, it’s possible (though not knowable) that Google’s effects on the various industries it has touched will be positive – and that seems to be an article of faith with those inside the door. But in the short term what economists call disruption or ‘creative destruction’,
and Google sees as the cutting away of inefficiency, translates in the real world into lost jobs, reduced revenues for huge companies and the slow, painful demise of the newspaper industry as it struggles to deal with content aggregators, the loss of ad sales and the balkanization of its audience.

The company falls victim to an old, familiar failing of visionaries and engineers: the One Big Fix. Google likes to operate at a global level, doing deals in bulk. The
Google Book Settlement – which I mentioned earlier, and which is still rumbling on – is a case in point. It’s a meandering and somewhat convoluted story, but these are the bones: in 2002 Google began digitizing books in libraries, and in 2004 launched a
Book Search service which allowed users to search what it had digitized. As well as the whole of any public domain text, Book Search would display snippets of any work in the database but still under
copyright that was relevant to the search. In 2005 Google was sued by several distinct groups for copyright infringement. The cases became a class action – US law allows for the creation of a single suit which is representative of a class of suits and deals with all of them at once – and instead of taking the case to court to fight on the merits of the situation, the parties opted to attempt to create an extraordinary new deal under which Google would create a massive library and retailer of copyright works. Essentially, it was an attempt to gain the right to trade in the majority of books ever written, even or especially those whose ownership was unclear. The Amended Settlement Agreement was rejected on very narrow legal grounds: it attempted to give Google permission to act in a given way
in future
, which
Judge Denny Chin ruled was beyond the scope of what the court could permit. The various other objections therefore remain untested.

Litigation and calls for changes in legislation are a fascinating recurring pattern in digital commerce. Because the legal structures of our society have grown up in tandem with the industries they regulate and serve – and which, of course, they also create
in the same way that the rules of football create the game – they are often disadvantageous to new arrivals with new agendas and desires. The response of digital businesses, quite often, is to demand a ‘levelling’ of the playing field which actually entails the destruction of the old business model in favour of one which favours the new paradigm. The Google Book Settlement was one example, but there are others;
Google Music, until very recently, was bogged down because the company wanted to negotiate for huge bundles of content where the industry does deals on a one-to-one basis, with different contractual provisions for different artists. Google’s energy is directed at large-scale solutions to large problems, grand answers. In physical terms, the company likes to build machines that are visible from space – but much of the world’s population still lives in the areas through which these titanic engines must pass.

Efficiency, meanwhile, is an alien sort of god. Human life is in many ways blazingly inefficient. Some rather extreme examples: we spend ages trying to meet people we like, randomly zinging through bad and better relationships, learning skills and habits and empathies that either improve or (sadly) reduce our chances of meeting someone with whom we can be happy. Likewise, we pick our professions if not at random at least with a healthy degree of chance and irrationality. How much more efficient would it be to mechanize, centralize or mediate these processes? Vastly. Is it desirable to do so? That’s less obvious.

What effect would it have on us as a society and as individuals to have a vast database of personality types and physical preferences and know that at a certain point the Love Authority would let us know we had a viable match? Would it be acceptable to us to have our future professional life dictated by strenuous testing? People already use dating and headhunting services so it hardly seems like too much of a stretch for these things to become the norm, or to use them retroactively: according to the system, that nice guy you met the other day has a low, low percentage chance
of becoming a good husband. Probably best to ditch him. By the way, your dream job doesn’t really match your level of competence or education or even your personality. Think again! Or more: surely the traditional methods of child-rearing and care are both inefficient and fraught with poor practices: how would we solve that?

I have unfairly biased the case against efficiency. It does not imply these totalitarian ways of being, it merely creates them if you move efficiency into inappropriate spaces. And yet at the same time, I haven’t: the ethos of time-saving and resource-saving runs clear and hard through Google’s approach to many areas which are almost as complex and bound up with our society as it stands as these, and while the world may be diffusely ‘better’ if we accept them, it’s not obvious by what mechanism or on what timescale, and nor is it clear what the adoption will do to us more generally. What will we turn into if we accept the premise that efficiency is best? The faith seems to be teleological: blow away the old, tangled nonsense and usher in a new foundation and the world will automatically fall into a better configuration. People will step forward to make it so. Never mind that this seems to my untutored eye to be a little optimistic – break the ugly vase and a new one will replace it – it ignores the fact that the very decision to do that, to tear down what’s there rather than phasing it out or improving it, is itself a part of the message.