had high barriers to entry. I imagined a rapid spread of education and critical thinking once we surmounted the millennium-old problems of information scarcity and maldistribution.
But in the early part of this century, my mood soured and my enthusiasm waned. I saw my great hopes for an open and free Internet corrupted by the simultaneous pressures of inadequate security (in the form of fraud, spam, viruses, and malware) and the attempts at a corporate lockdown of culture and technology.2 I saw that the resistance to openness, transparency, accountability, and democracy was stronger than I had imagined and present in parts of the world—including my own—where I thought the forces of light had triumphed long ago.3 I worried that the environment generated by the global reach of the Internet was pulling us in opposite directions—toward both anarchy and oligarchy—and draining the institutions and environments that would foster more
reasonable, republican virtues, such as measured deliberation, critical thought, and mutual respect.4 I noted the ways in which those who promoted the digitization and networking of all things reverted to simplistic and wrongheaded views of how technology works in society.5 I grew weary of others’ attempts to describe technology as an irresistible force that young people have mastered and old people must conform to or wither away trying to resist.6 And I had an intellectual allergic reaction to the growing notion that one company—Google—could or would solve some of the greatest and most complex human problems simply by applying the principles of engineering.7
So I sought a way to explore both my disenchantment with and my approval of changes in our global information ecosystem. I wanted to embrace and champion values and goals such as liberty, creativity, and democracy while offering criticisms of trends and trajectories that I consider harmful or dangerous, such as blind faith in technology and market fundamentalism. And Google exemplifies all these trends.
Because books move more slowly than large, rich Internet companies, I have not attempted to catalog or analyze the company’s recent initiatives. Instead, I have tried to discern broad and significant themes and patterns that should hold constant for some years. If Google has dramatically changed course between the date that I finished this text and the date you begin reading it, I apologize in advance. Tracking Google was never my goal; instead, I seek to explain why and how Google tracks us.
Previous books about Google have focused, understandably, on the company’s rise and triumph. They have revealed the unique story, culture, and principles that have made Google one of the most pervasive and important institutions in the world. These books have exposed the inner workings of the company, its bold technologies, its brilliant methods of generating revenue, the peculiar vision of its founders, the talents of its chief operating officer, and the revolutionary nature of its approach to making sense of the Internet. I could not write a biography of the company or an exploration of the science of Web search; there are already many excellent examples of such projects. Nor could I write a primer on how one might replicate or learn from Google’s success; another recent book fulfills that function. Nor does this book purport to “get inside” the minds of the visionaries who run the company, as other, more connected writers have.8
This book is not about Google; instead, it is about how we use Google. It explains the ways we have embraced Google and invited it into a wide variety of human activities. It also examines the resistance to and concern about Google, which is growing as its reach spreads across the globe. It explores the terms of the relationships between Google and its billions of users, and it considers the moral consequences of Google’s actions and policies.
This book is much more about us—how we use Google, what we expect of it, and what we give to it—than about Google. My modest hope is that you will approach that screen with the friendly search box and clever logo with a keener sense of what happens when you type the name of the thing you’re looking for. To search for something on the Web using Google is not unlike confessing your desires to a mysterious power. If nothing else, I hope to deflate hyperbole about the company, its services, and the Web in general, and to shift the tone of public conversation from one of blind faith and worship of the new to one of sober concern about the wrenching changes we have invited and unleashed. Most of all, I hope we will all approach the future of human knowledge with wisdom and trepidation rather than naive, dazzled awe.
INTRODUCTION
THE GOSPEL OF GOOGLE
In the beginning, the World Wide Web was an intimidating collection, interlinked yet unindexed. Clutter and confusion reigned. It was impossible to sift the valuable from the trashy, the reliable from the exploitative, and the true from the false. The Web was exciting and democratic—to the point of anarchy. As it expanded and became unimaginably vast, its darker corners grew more remote and more obscure. Some had tried to map its most useful features to guide searchers through the maelstrom. But their services were unwieldy and incomplete, and some early guides even accepted bribes for favoring one source over another. It all seemed so hopeless and seedy. Too much that was precious but subtle and fresh was getting lost.
Then came Google. Google was clean. It was pure. It was simple. It accepted no money for ranking one page higher in a search than another. And it offered what seemed to be neutral, democratic rankings: if one site was referred to more than another, it was deemed more relevant to users and would be listed above the rest. And so the biggest, if not the best, search engine was created.
This, in brief, was the genesis of the enterprise known as Google Inc. Like all theological texts, the Book of Google contains contradictions that leave us baffled, pondering whether we mere mortals are capable of understanding the nature of the system itself. Perhaps our role is not to doubt, but to believe. Perhaps we should just surf along in awe of the system that gives us such beautiful sunrises—or at least easily finds us digital images of sunrises with just a few keystrokes. Like all such narratives, it underwrites a kind of faith—faith in the goodwill of an enterprise whose motto is “Don’t be evil,” whose mission is “to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful,” and whose ambition is to create the perfect search engine.
On the basis of that faith—born of users’ experiences with the services that Google provides—since the search engine first appeared and spread through word of mouth for a dozen years, Google has permeated our culture. That’s what I mean by Googlization. It is a ubiquitous brand: Google is used as a noun and a verb everywhere from adolescent conversations to scripts for Sex and the City. It seems that even governments are being Googlized, or rendered part of the vast data storm that Google has taken as its challenge to organize and make available.1
Google puts previously unimaginable resources at our fingertips—huge libraries, archives, warehouses of government records, troves of goods, the comings and goings of whole swaths of humanity. That is what I mean by the Googlization of “everything.” Googlization affects three large areas of human concern and conduct: “us” (through Google’s effects on our personal information, habits, opinions, and judgments); “the world” (through the globalization of a strange kind of surveillance and what I’ll call infrastructural imperialism); and “knowledge” (through its effects on the use of the great bodies of knowledge accumulated in books, online databases, and the Web).
Google consequently is far more than just the most interesting and successful Internet company of all time. As it catalogs our individual and collective judgments, opinions, and (most important) desires, it has grown to be one of the most important global institutions as well. As we shift more of our Internet use to Google-branded services such as Gmail and YouTube, Google is on the verge of becoming indistinguishable from the Web itself. The Googlization of everything will likely have significant transformative effects in coming years, both good and bad. Google will affect the ways that organizations, firms, and governments act, both for and at times against their “users.”
To
