18
theory on demand
‘Don’t Be Evil’ is the motto of Google’s two founders, Sergey Brin and Larry Page. The two Stanford alumni have, thanks to an arcane management of their own public image, managed to create the notion of a ‘benign giant’, eager to archive our ‘search intentions’ in his humongous data banks. The digital alter ego of millions of users appears to be in safe hands at the Mountain View, California central data hub, better known as ‘the Googleplex’. It is there – and in many other data retention centers that have mushroomed all over the planet – that nothing less than the war for total domination of the Web is being waged. First step is a cheerful embrace of ‘abundance capitalism’. Biopolitical control stricto sensu is the name of the game here: working conditions are much better than merely comfortable, the atmosphere is chummy, and bonuses are raining down on the employees, who, happy and thankful, love to be exploited and become the best supporters of the company, and proud to be part of its conquering and ‘be good’ image. The methods and objectives of Google have a positive outcome for all; the firm’s philosophy, based on certified academic excellence, and the commitment to innovation and scientific research is rolled out in ten clear-cut ‘truths’ on Google’s site.2 These ‘Ten Commandments’ constitute a Gospel of sorts for the Digital Era, while the ‘Google-thought’ is propagated by pure and unassuming ‘evangelists’, all eminent personalities of the world of information and communication technology. Google’s last but not least weapon is its adoption of the collaborative development methods that are the hallmark of the Open Source movement. Here, products are based on Free and Open Source Software (F/OSS), which is not protected by copyright or patents. In doing so, Google reduces the development and improvement costs of its own services, while at the same time obtaining the support of techies, hackers and various kind of other amateurs, and manages to profile itself as champion of free knowledge dissemination, since using its search engine appears to offer a way to access the Web that is both free and meritorious. However, Brin’s and Page’s dream of ‘The Whole Internet into Google’, a dream pursued even inside reputed universities is a demagogic concept in the end, an idea that serves to abide by a near-positivist cult of scientific objectivity: as if in the chaos that is the Web, only a superior technology could vouch for the transparency of search procedures and accuracy of the results – and all this for the best of democracy! Google’s auto-proclamation of itself as a ‘democratic’ instrument is grounded on the allegedly ‘democratic’ character of the Web itself. Its indexation algorithm PageRank[TM] is constantly copying digital data in its data-centers, assigning them a value based on the links that are associated with each web-page. In fact, Google interprets a link from page A to page B as a vote in favor of the latter by the former. But it does not stop at counting the number of votes cast or links established by a page, it also weights that page in. If a page is deemed ‘important’, its votes will count for more and will thus ‘add value’ to the pages it links to. PageRank[TM] assigns a higher value to important and high-quality sites by using criteria and filters whose nature is not in the public domain, and which are used every time a Google search is launched. Google’s ‘democracy’ hence shapes the
2. See, http://www.google.com/about/company/philosophy/.