Is Google becoming evil?
Posted 4:16 AM

It was my prediction that the moment Google went public, it had started down the road to the dark side. It's just the nature of public companies to gradually absolve themselves of all personal responsibility for their actions. Now you can use this handy tool to graph Google's descent into the abyss.

There are many critics of Google. The site, Google Watch is often quoted. But it's clear to me that the arguments and documents on that website are anything buy clear. The site Google Watch Watch which claims to refute the arguments at Google Watch, is similarly flawed in it's reasoning. And yet both are frequently cited by journalists and bloggers in articles about Google. Including myself. Why?

Google's system, without intention, does the following:

• favors large corporate entities with big advertising budgets. Corporate press releases and public interviews generate highly-rated inbound links.
  
  
• buries sites critical of popular companies, products and people. Popular sites fill up search result pages with existing references. People search for these sites are likely to find these references and quote them - further shoring up a defense against criticism.
  
  
• renders new, innovative, internet sites, however valuable, nearly impossible to find. Google has no review system for incorporating new sites into its directory. New sites must rely on paid ad inclusions, or favors granted by webmsters of other popular sites, to be seen.
  
  
• favors sites, people and topics that are negatively controversial This same argument can be squarely and confidently leveled at any centralized media distribution system. Google Watch is poorly written, but it is sensationalist. Sensationalism sells.
  

Over time, it's seems like the nature of having a "monolithic" search company that it will become "evil", in the sense that these types of self-reinforcing imbalances will only grow over time.

A simpler way of looking at it is that Google, by centralizing traffic, makes the Internet into TV. And TV is a well-known evil.

Labels: google

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Essay from the future on space colonization
Posted 6:46 AM

The ironic thing about our space colonization effort is that the massive outpouring of greenhouse gasses caused by the constant shuttle launches required to lift thousands of colonists and supplies was the very thing that put Earth's ecology out of balance. Of course the exhaust wasn't the issue, as some people feared. It was the (inflation adjusted) quadrillions of dollars and enormous effort spent on the oil-age manufacture of shuttle after shuttle, rocket after rocket.

Would our ecosystem have collapsed as precipitously?

In 2039, the total carbon output from colony launches exceeded the output of all the car exhaust in the twentieth century. By 2045, the popular colonization effort had damaged the atmosphere more than all prior combusion technologies put together.

Not that we had much of a choice, or did we?

Humanity, despite the doomsday prophets best predictions, was not on the verge of a social and environmental collapse. These predictions, often blamed falsely on Christian fundamentalists, were espoused by vocal scientists and pundits, such as Steven Hawking and Freeman Dyson.

At the outset of the colonization effort, free access to birth control and the global women's rights movement had slashed population growth to near zero, and today it is even declining. Even more, the rising prices of oil was fueling the - now fully profitable - renewable energy industry (indeed now it's the only energy industry). Perhaps it was possible for mankind to regulate itself. Vaccination fears proved unfounded, and even the "megaflus" of Southeast Asia that everyone was afraid of were clearly not as destructive as we thought they might be.

We'll never know.

If we had waited a bit longer, for nanofactories to improve, it clearly wouldn't have been necessary to hoist as many supplies. Or if we were a bit less vain, we would have allowed remote manufacturing and robots to do more of the groundwork. The frequent and widely popularized shuttling of politicians and actors to and from Mars was a blatant reminder of our carelessness.

But waiting has never been mankinds style. We, as a species, seem to prefer to rush ahead and deal with the consequences later.

And we are now in the throes of an environmental collapse while the colonization effors still, despite claims of "independance" by a half-dozen colonies on Mars, is dependent on Earth for expensive mineral shipments.

Perhaps it's not too late to cut our losses?

Labels: fiction, politics

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Today
Posted 1:31 PM

So, living in Carrboro now. We went to Weaver St.'s jazz brunch. Going to our friend Jessica's for a barbecue on a gas grill. We're bringing tempeh.

It's fun, but still not entirely sold on the area though. Hard to get used to never bumping into people "on the way places" ... because you drive everywhere instead of walking. Such low synchronicity levels. I guess that's most of the U.S. though.

NYC seems expensive on paper (high rents). But some things (entertainment, transportation) are way cheaper. For us it's coming out about the same here in the Triangle as in NYC.

Labels: north carolina

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