The Googlization of Everything: (And Why We Should Worry) at Dominant Systems Book Store

Starred Review. What is the nature of the transaction between Google's computer algorithms and its millions of human users? Are we heading down a path toward a more enlightened age, or are we approaching a dystopia of social control and surveillance? With these and other questions, University of Virginia media studies and law professor Vaidhyanathan thoughtfully examines the insidious influence of Google on our society. In just over a decade, Google has moved so rapidly in its mission to "organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful" that cries of "Google it!" resound through high school classrooms, business offices, academic halls, and public libraries. As Vaidhyanathan points out, we must be cautious about embracing Google's mission and not accept uncritically that Google has our best interests in mind. He reminds us that Google is a publicly traded, revenue-driven firm that is dangerous in many subtle ways. By valuing popularity over accuracy and established sites over new ones, Google sets its own agenda regarding what information is most relevant to users, altering their perceptions about value and significance. Vaidhyanathan admirably concludes with a design for an information ecosystem called the Human Knowledge Project, which would be a more democratic means of parsing and organizing knowledge. (Mar.)
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Customer Reviews & Comments
On one hand, as his title implies, Siva Vaidhyanathan's mission in "Googlization" is to lambast Google because it supposedly "rules like Caesar." It's crime? Basically, it gives consumers what they want. "Faith in Google is dangerous because it increases our appetite for goods, services, information, amusement, distraction, and efficiency," he says. Needless to say, it's hard to sympathize with a complaint that a company is making us too happy or comfortable. But his book goes well beyond simply Google-bashing and serves as a fusillade against what he considers really "harmful or dangerous" which is "blind faith in technology and market fundamentalism." Even though he admits that no one forces us to use Google and that (as with more other companies and services) consumers are also able to opt-out of most of its services or data collection practices, Vaidhyanathan argues that "such choices mean very little" because "the design of the system rigs it in favor of the interests of the company and against the interests of users." But, again, he says this is not just a Google problem. Apparently everyone is scheming against consumers using the myth of "choice." "Celebrating freedom and user autonomy is one of the great rhetorical ploys of the global information economy," Vaidhyanathan says. "We are conditioned to believe that having more choices--empty through they may be--is the very essence of human freedom. But meaningful freedom implies real control over the conditions of one's life." Vaidhyanathan doesn't really connect the dots to tell us how Google or any of the other evil capitalist overlords have supposedly conspired to take away such "real control" over the conditions of our lives. Instead, he just implies that any "choice" they offer us are "false," "empty," or "irrelevant" choices and that he and other elites can help us see through the web of lies (excuse the pun) and chart a better course. Sadly, such elitist thinking is all too common in many recent books about the Internet's impact on society. See recent books by Andrew Keen, Mark Helprin, Lee Siegel and even to some extent Jaron Lanier. But these critics simply don't give humanity enough credit and they utterly fail to recognize how humans excel at adapting to change. Regardless, when it comes to solutions to what most of would consider the non-problem of excessive consumer choice, Vaidhyanathan suggests that we should more carefully plan technological progress to ensure that (a) no harms come from it and, (b) that all benefit equally from its riches when it occurs. More specifically, progress needs to be centrally planned through a political process so that "we" have more of a say about the future. Although he is short on details about whom the technocratic vanguard will be that will lead the effort to take back the reins of power, he's at least got a name for it and plan of action. Vaidhyanathan calls for the creation of "The Human Knowledge Project" to "identify a series of policy challenges, infrastructure needs, philosophical insights, and technological challenges with a single realizable goal in mind: to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible." Although this is already spontaneously happening in the marketplace, Vaidhyanathan says, "it's better to have these things argued in a deliberative forum than decided according to the whims of market forces, technological imperatives, and secretive contracts." His call for a centralized vision and plan of action also comes down to his fundamental distrust of market processes in information and his over-arching faith in the wisdom of the technocratic elite to chart a more sensible path forward. "It's more important to do it right than to do it fast. It's more important to have knowledge sources that will work one hundred years from now than to have a collection of poor images that we can see next week." But when Vaidhyanathan says "it's more important to do it right," the operational assumption is that we already know what "it" is and how to do it "right." And when he suggests "it's more important to have knowledge sources that will work one hundred years from now," it suggest that somewhere out there a more enlightened path exists and that he and some other elites in the Human Knowledge Project apparently possess a map to guide us to it. But there's absolutely no way any of us could know which "knowledge sources" will work one hundred years from now or even 10 years from now, for that matter. That is precisely where markets come in. Organic, bottom-up, unplanned experimentation is valuable precisely because of the limitations of human knowledge and planning. Wikipedia, for example, isn't the product a highly planned, centralized vision set forth by some massive information bureaucracy. I doubt a "Human Knowledge Project" could have designed such a thing from scratch 10 years ago. Instead, they would have likely started with Encyclopedia Britannica and Encarta as models and then spent billions trying to figure out how to make them better. Also, Vaidhyanathan never bothers considering how expanded the horizons of state power in the ways he wishes might become an open invitation for even more of the corporate shenanigans he despises. After all, history teaches us that regulatory capture is all too real. Vaidhyanathan's bleak view of consumers and the course of technological progress is unwarranted. There's never been a period in human history when we've had access to more technology, more information, more services, more of just about everything. While we humans have wallowed in information poverty for the vast majority of our existence, we now live in a world of unprecedented information abundance and cultural richness. It's always easy to suggest that there is "a better path," Vaidhyanathan does here, but the path we're on right now isn't looking so bad and does not require the radical prescriptions he calls for. You can find my complete review of Vaidhyanathan's book on the Technology Liberation Front blog.

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