Hyper-Personal Solstice

This from a BBC article about how Google "anonymises information" after 18 months:

The more a search engine can learn about a user's surfing habits, the better it can predict their intent.

With more web history data, Google could offer users a "hyper-personal" experience, with results based on potentially years' worth of pattern analysis of a user's search history.

Speaking about the long-term aspirations for Google, Eric Schmidt, the firm's chief executive, said one day the search engine could potentially answer questions such as "What shall I do tomorrow?" and "Which college should I go to?".

"Google is not at all done with your information problems. There are many, many examples of where it would be nice if Google had more of an ability to understand time and choices.

"It will be some years before we can at least partially answer those questions. But the eventual outcome is... that Google can answer a more hypothetical question."

He added: "The important principle, and I want to say this over and over again, is that this is opt-in, user choice."

Until it is no longer an opt-in choice. Who shall I vote for? Shall I break this law which needs breaking? How can I replace this regime which transports people to foreign countries for torture and detention? being examples of perfectly valid questions which might compromise one's own security, given a sudden change in Google's policy, post-take over by a mega-corporation, based perhaps in China.

Why look to China, when many nations are less than perfect? Size, culture and politics.

China is a newly resurgent capitalist on the outside, but it has a cold, organ-harvesting heart on the inside, persecuting its people relentlessly, using the old tactic preferred by Goebels - invent an enemy within, and use it to justify repression. Falun Gong are the Al Qaeda of the Chinese media, a hate figure mentioned daily to increase fear.

"The camp is said to hold over 6,000 Falun Gong adherents at any given time, and nobody has yet come out from it alive. According to the source, it contains a crematorium, and an unusually large number of doctors work there reflecting the camps practice of killing prisoners for their organs, which are then sold for profit."

China is essentially a centralised monopoly, accounting for one fifth of the world's population, with a standing army 2.2 million strong, increased "defense" spending, a high-tech "army within an army", home to one million men who, because of China's population policy and female infanticide, will never find wives, on record as economy first, ecology second, and now, in space to play their part in total military domination of the planet. And don't forget that "No Evil" Google fell into line with their censorship policy in order to buy their way into the lucrative market.

I have often written about Google in this blog, and it finally gave me the reason for moving the centre of my creative life away from here. Any monopolistic culture is inherently weak; the philosophy which provides me with this knowledge is Chinese - funnily enough, a lot of this philosophy finds its way into Falun Gong:

Tao Te Ching - Lao Tzu - chapter 36

That which shrinks
Must first expand.
That which fails
Must first be strong.
That which is cast down
Must first be raised.
Before receiving
There must be giving.

This is called perception of the nature of things.
Soft and weak overcome hard and strong.

Fish cannot leave deep waters,
And a country's weapons should not be displayed.

I've learned to use Google, and to be honest, I use it well, I even enjoy using it, placing new words and phrases into the lexicography. I have made one business successful by using it well, and started another business as a result. Someone characterised the entire Web 2.0 phenomenon as "post-Google" and they are right. Many, many web-based businesses are not web-based, they are Google based. Take Google away, and they fall instantly flat.

My friend Ewan recently spouted this chestnut when describing Google - "biggest advertising agency in the world, also do search" - but Google are NOT an ad agency, which relies on the creativity and marketing psychology of the people within it - they are more like a huge, bottom-trawling, factory fishing vessel - like "fishing with a bulldozer" - and the danger is that the more we rely upon Google, anything that is outside / avoided / censored is relegated to nullspace. Do we want this? Do we really want our ocean of learning, language, meaning and human aspiration scraped clean until it is a lifeless, submerged desert?

There are projects which are critiques of Google's massively dominant position - notably Google Will Eat Itself which uses Adsense to buy Google shares - but according to the "Google Ownership Counter" it will currently take 202,345,125 years to buy Google, and so clever though these are, they exist merely to titillate. In the meantime, and very shortly, unchecked capitalism will probably exhaust the earth, human society will fail and fall, taking with it over 90% of all species, and we'll run out of power for our servers and batteries for our laptops. Nature, which has a way of knowing best, will PWN us, and no hack will restore the empty supermarkets.

Still, this dystopic vision doesn't scare me. It does however make me determined to act smart; and so in three more days, I rest my case. Apparently.


Google China solstice