By Evgeny Morozov
July 13, 2011
In the Plex: How Google Thinks, Works, and Shapes Our Lives
By Steven Levy
The Googlization of Everything (And Why We Should Worry)
By Siva Vaidhyanathan
I.
For cyber-optimists and cyber-pessimists alike, the advent of Google marks off two very distinct periods in Internet history. The optimists remember the age before Google as chaotic, inefficient, and disorganized. Most search engines at the time had poor ethics (some made money by misrepresenting ads as search results) and terrible algorithms (some could not even find their parent companies online). All of that changed when two Stanford graduate students invented an ingenious way to rank Web pages based on how many other pages link to them. Other innovations spurred by Google—especially its novel platform for selling highly targeted ads—have created a new “ecosystem” (the optimists’ favorite buzzword) for producing and disseminating information. Thanks to Google, publishers of all stripes—from novice bloggers in New Delhi to media mandarins in New York—could cash in on their online popularity.
Cyber-pessimists see things quite differently. They wax nostalgic for the early days of the Web when discovery was random, and even fun. They complain that Google has destroyed the joy of serendipitous Web surfing, while its much-celebrated ecosystem is just a toxic wasteland of info-junk. Worse, it’s being constantly polluted by a contingent of “content farms” that produce trivial tidbits of information in order to receive a hefty advertising paycheck from the Googleplex. The skeptics charge that the company treats information as a commodity, trivializing the written word and seeking to turn access to knowledge into a dubious profit-center. Worst of all, Google’s sprawling technology may have created a digital panopticon, making privacy obsolete.
Both camps like to stress that Google is a unique enterprise that stands apart from the rest of Silicon Valley. The optimists do this to convince the public that the company’s motives are benign. If only we could bring ourselves to trust Google, their logic goes, its bright young engineers would deliver us the revolutionary services that we could never expect from our governments. The pessimists make a more intriguing case: for them, the company is so new, sly, and fluid, and the threats that it poses to society are so invisible, insidious, and monumental, that regulators may not yet have the proper analytical models to understand its true market and cultural power. That our anachronistic laws may be incapable of treating such a complex entity should not detract us from thwarting its ambitions.
These are not mutually exclusive positions. History is rife with examples of how benign and humanistic ideals can yield rather insidious outcomes—especially when backed by unchecked power and messianic rhetoric. The real question, then, is whether there is anything truly exceptional about Google’s principles, goals, and methods that would help it avoid this fate.
IS GOOGLE’S EXCEPTIONALISM genuine? On the surface, the answer seems self-evident. The company’s collegial working environment, its idealistic belief that corporations can make money without dirtying their hands, its quixotic quest to organize all of the world’s information, its founders’ contempt for marketing and conventional advertising— everything about the company screams, “We are special!” What normal company warns investors—on the very day of its initial public offering!—that it is willing to “forgo some short-term gains” in order to do “good things for the world”?
As Google’s ambitions multiply, however, its exceptionalism can no longer be taken for granted. Two new books shed light on this issue. Steven Levy had unrivaled access to Google’s executives, and In the Plex is a colorful journalistic account of the company’s history. Levy’s basic premise is that Google is both special and crucial, while the battle for its future is also a battle for the future of the Internet. As Levy puts it, “To understand this pioneering company and its people is to grasp our technological destiny.” What the German poet Friedrich Hebbel said of nineteenth-century Austria—that it is “a little world where the big one holds its tryouts”—also applies to Google. Siva Vaidhyanathan’s book is a far more intellectually ambitious project that seeks to document the company’s ecological footprint on the public sphere. Unlike Levy, Vaidhyanathan seeks to place Google’s meteoric rise and exceptionalism in the proper historical, cultural, and regulatory contexts, and suggests public alternatives to some of Google’s ambitious projects.
Even though both writers share the initial premise that, to quote Vaidhyanathan, Google is “nothing like anything we have seen before,” they provide different explanations of Google’s uniqueness. Levy opts for a “great man of history” approach and emphasizes the idealism and the quirkiness of its two founders. The obvious limitation of Levy’s method is that he pays very little attention to the broader intellectual context—the ongoing scholarly debates about the best approaches to information retrieval and the utility (and feasibility) of artificial intelligence—that must have shaped Google’s founders far more than the Montessori schooling system that so excites him.
Vaidhyanathan, while arguing that Google is “such a new phenomenon that old metaphors and precedents don’t fit the challenges the company presents to competitors and users,” posits that its power is mostly a function of recent developments in the information industry as well as of various market and public failures that occurred in the last few decades. Quoting the Marxist theorist David Harvey, Vaidhyanathan argues that the fall of communism in Eastern Europe and the resulting euphoria over “the end of history” and the triumph of neoliberalism has made the “notion of gentle, creative state involvement to guide processes toward the public good ... impossible to imagine, let alone propose.” Moreover, the growing penetration of market solutions into sectors that were traditionally managed by public institutions—from fighting wars to managing prisons and from schooling to health care—has made Google’s forays into digitizing books appear quite normal, set against the dismal state of public libraries and the continued sell-out of higher education to the highest corporate bidder. Thus Vaidhyanathan arrives at a rather odd and untenable conclusion: that Google is indeed exceptional—but its exceptionalism has little to do with Google.
Google’s two founders appear to firmly believe in their own exceptionalism. They are bold enough to think that the laws of sociology and organizational theory—for example, that most institutions, no matter how creative, are likely to end up in the “iron cage” of highly rationalized bureaucracy—do not apply to Google. This belief runs so deep that for a while they tried to run the company without middle managers—with disastrous results. Google’s embarrassing bouts of corporate autism—those increasingly frequent moments when the company is revealed to be out of touch with the outside world—stem precisely from this odd refusal to acknowledge its own normality. Time and again, its engineers fail to anticipate the loud public outcry over the privacy flaws in its products, not because they lack the technical knowledge to patch the related problems but because they have a hard time imagining an outside world where Google is seen as just another greedy corporation that might have incentives to behave unethically.
Read more:
July 13, 2011
In the Plex: How Google Thinks, Works, and Shapes Our Lives
By Steven Levy
The Googlization of Everything (And Why We Should Worry)
By Siva Vaidhyanathan
I.
For cyber-optimists and cyber-pessimists alike, the advent of Google marks off two very distinct periods in Internet history. The optimists remember the age before Google as chaotic, inefficient, and disorganized. Most search engines at the time had poor ethics (some made money by misrepresenting ads as search results) and terrible algorithms (some could not even find their parent companies online). All of that changed when two Stanford graduate students invented an ingenious way to rank Web pages based on how many other pages link to them. Other innovations spurred by Google—especially its novel platform for selling highly targeted ads—have created a new “ecosystem” (the optimists’ favorite buzzword) for producing and disseminating information. Thanks to Google, publishers of all stripes—from novice bloggers in New Delhi to media mandarins in New York—could cash in on their online popularity.
Cyber-pessimists see things quite differently. They wax nostalgic for the early days of the Web when discovery was random, and even fun. They complain that Google has destroyed the joy of serendipitous Web surfing, while its much-celebrated ecosystem is just a toxic wasteland of info-junk. Worse, it’s being constantly polluted by a contingent of “content farms” that produce trivial tidbits of information in order to receive a hefty advertising paycheck from the Googleplex. The skeptics charge that the company treats information as a commodity, trivializing the written word and seeking to turn access to knowledge into a dubious profit-center. Worst of all, Google’s sprawling technology may have created a digital panopticon, making privacy obsolete.
Both camps like to stress that Google is a unique enterprise that stands apart from the rest of Silicon Valley. The optimists do this to convince the public that the company’s motives are benign. If only we could bring ourselves to trust Google, their logic goes, its bright young engineers would deliver us the revolutionary services that we could never expect from our governments. The pessimists make a more intriguing case: for them, the company is so new, sly, and fluid, and the threats that it poses to society are so invisible, insidious, and monumental, that regulators may not yet have the proper analytical models to understand its true market and cultural power. That our anachronistic laws may be incapable of treating such a complex entity should not detract us from thwarting its ambitions.
These are not mutually exclusive positions. History is rife with examples of how benign and humanistic ideals can yield rather insidious outcomes—especially when backed by unchecked power and messianic rhetoric. The real question, then, is whether there is anything truly exceptional about Google’s principles, goals, and methods that would help it avoid this fate.
IS GOOGLE’S EXCEPTIONALISM genuine? On the surface, the answer seems self-evident. The company’s collegial working environment, its idealistic belief that corporations can make money without dirtying their hands, its quixotic quest to organize all of the world’s information, its founders’ contempt for marketing and conventional advertising— everything about the company screams, “We are special!” What normal company warns investors—on the very day of its initial public offering!—that it is willing to “forgo some short-term gains” in order to do “good things for the world”?
As Google’s ambitions multiply, however, its exceptionalism can no longer be taken for granted. Two new books shed light on this issue. Steven Levy had unrivaled access to Google’s executives, and In the Plex is a colorful journalistic account of the company’s history. Levy’s basic premise is that Google is both special and crucial, while the battle for its future is also a battle for the future of the Internet. As Levy puts it, “To understand this pioneering company and its people is to grasp our technological destiny.” What the German poet Friedrich Hebbel said of nineteenth-century Austria—that it is “a little world where the big one holds its tryouts”—also applies to Google. Siva Vaidhyanathan’s book is a far more intellectually ambitious project that seeks to document the company’s ecological footprint on the public sphere. Unlike Levy, Vaidhyanathan seeks to place Google’s meteoric rise and exceptionalism in the proper historical, cultural, and regulatory contexts, and suggests public alternatives to some of Google’s ambitious projects.
Even though both writers share the initial premise that, to quote Vaidhyanathan, Google is “nothing like anything we have seen before,” they provide different explanations of Google’s uniqueness. Levy opts for a “great man of history” approach and emphasizes the idealism and the quirkiness of its two founders. The obvious limitation of Levy’s method is that he pays very little attention to the broader intellectual context—the ongoing scholarly debates about the best approaches to information retrieval and the utility (and feasibility) of artificial intelligence—that must have shaped Google’s founders far more than the Montessori schooling system that so excites him.
Vaidhyanathan, while arguing that Google is “such a new phenomenon that old metaphors and precedents don’t fit the challenges the company presents to competitors and users,” posits that its power is mostly a function of recent developments in the information industry as well as of various market and public failures that occurred in the last few decades. Quoting the Marxist theorist David Harvey, Vaidhyanathan argues that the fall of communism in Eastern Europe and the resulting euphoria over “the end of history” and the triumph of neoliberalism has made the “notion of gentle, creative state involvement to guide processes toward the public good ... impossible to imagine, let alone propose.” Moreover, the growing penetration of market solutions into sectors that were traditionally managed by public institutions—from fighting wars to managing prisons and from schooling to health care—has made Google’s forays into digitizing books appear quite normal, set against the dismal state of public libraries and the continued sell-out of higher education to the highest corporate bidder. Thus Vaidhyanathan arrives at a rather odd and untenable conclusion: that Google is indeed exceptional—but its exceptionalism has little to do with Google.
Google’s two founders appear to firmly believe in their own exceptionalism. They are bold enough to think that the laws of sociology and organizational theory—for example, that most institutions, no matter how creative, are likely to end up in the “iron cage” of highly rationalized bureaucracy—do not apply to Google. This belief runs so deep that for a while they tried to run the company without middle managers—with disastrous results. Google’s embarrassing bouts of corporate autism—those increasingly frequent moments when the company is revealed to be out of touch with the outside world—stem precisely from this odd refusal to acknowledge its own normality. Time and again, its engineers fail to anticipate the loud public outcry over the privacy flaws in its products, not because they lack the technical knowledge to patch the related problems but because they have a hard time imagining an outside world where Google is seen as just another greedy corporation that might have incentives to behave unethically.
Read more:
