this phenomenon, we need to temper our uncritical faith in Google and its corporate benevolence and adopt an agnostic stance. That is, we need to examine what Google has told us about itself, its means, and its motives as it makes the world anew in these ways, and to interrogate and evaluate both the consequences of Googlization and the ways we respond to it.
One way to begin is by realizing that we are not Google’s customers: we are its product. We—our fancies, fetishes, predilections, and preferences—are what Google sells to advertisers. When we use Google to find out things on the Web, Google uses our Web searches to find out things about us. Therefore, we need to understand Google and how it influences what we know and believe.
Because of our faith in Google and its claims of omniscience, omnipotence, and benevolence, we tend to grant Google’s search results inordinate and undeserved power.2 These results offer the illusion of precision, accuracy, and relevance. Psychologists at the University of California at Berkeley have even published a study claiming that Google’s Web-search technique mimics the way human brains recall information.3 So it is understandable that we have come to believe that Google’s search rankings are a proxy for quality of information, simply an extension of our collective judgment. But this belief is unhealthy and wrong. The rules of the game are rigged in certain ways, and we need a much clearer idea of how this is done.
If I can convince you that we should be concerned about the ease with which we have allowed everything to be Googlized, I hope I can lead you to consider some remedies as well. I am confident we can find ways to live more wisely with Google. My argument comes from a perspective that is too often lost in accounts of the details of technological innovations and their effects on our daily lives: the pursuit of global civic responsibility and the public good. Hopes for a more enlightened future rest in our ability both to recognize the assumptions embedded in our faith in Google and to harness public resources to correct for them. So this book is also overtly political. It calls for a reimagination of what we might build to preserve quality information and deliver it to everyone. It examines the prospects for the creation of a global public sphere, a space between the particular domestic spheres where we live most of our lives and the massive state institutions that loom over us—a space where we can meet, deliberate, and transform both the domestic and the political. We can’t depend on one or even a dozen companies to do that equitably and justly. Google seems to offer us everything so cheaply, easily, and quickly. But nothing truly meaningful is cheap, easy, or quick.
After years of immersion in details of Google’s growth, I can come to only one clear judgment about the company and our relationship with it: Google is not evil, but neither is it morally good. Nor is it simply neutral—far from it. Google does not make us smarter. Nor does it make us dumber, as at least one writer has claimed.4 It’s a publicly traded, revenue-driven firm that offers us set of tools we can use intelligently or dumbly. But Google is not uniformly and unequivocally good for us. In fact, it’s dangerous in many subtle ways. It’s dangerous because of our increasing, uncritical faith in and dependence on it, and because of the way it fractures and disrupts almost every market or activity it enters—usually for the better, but sometimes for the worse. Google is simultaneously new, wealthy, and powerful. This rare combination means that we have not yet assessed or come to terms with the changes it brings to our habits, perspectives, judgments, transactions, and imaginations.5
Faith in Google is thus dangerous as the airplane and the automobile have proved dangerous in ways their pioneers did not anticipate in the 1920s. These technologies of mobility and discovery are dangerous not just because they physically endanger their users but because we use them recklessly, use them too much, and design daily life around them. Thus we have done tremendous harm to ourselves and our world. As early as 1910, the technologies of motorized transportation were impressive and clearly revolutionary. It was not hard to see that human life would soon be radically transformed by the ability to move people and goods across continents and oceans in a matter of hours. Only a few years later, life on earth was unimaginable without these systems, and by the close of the twentieth century, the entire world was reorganized around them.
The dangers arose because we let the automobile companies and airlines dictate both public discourse and policy. The rules of the road were worked out rather quickly and almost entirely in favor of the automobile: more people became motorists, and fewer were pedestrians. Soon after World War II, flying and driving became elements of daily life for most of the developed world. Yet the externalities of both these transport systems—from global climate change to global terrorism to global pandemics—have left us wondering how we made so many bad decisions about both of them. We did not acknowledge all the hazards created by our rush to move and connect goods and people, and so we did not plan. We did not limit. We did not deliberate. We did not deploy wisdom and caution in the face of the new and powerful. We did not come to terms with how dangerous planes and cars really are. Even had we acknowledged the range of threats that they generate, we would not have wished for a world without them. But we might well have demanded better training, safeguards, rules, and systems early on and thus curbed the pernicious results while embracing the positive, liberating effects they have on our lives.
We have designed our environments to serve cars and planes instead of people. Our political systems have been used to favor and subsidize these industries, even as they have been held up as models of free enterprise. And thus we have become dangerously dependent on them. We began to recognize the problems that they posed only in the 1960s and now are all too aware of them. But it’s far too late. As Elvis warned us, “Fools rush in.”6
Google and the Web it governs are nowhere near as dangerous as our automobile system. People aren’t made ill or run over by Web pages. Nonetheless, blind faith in Google is dangerous because Google is so good at what it does and because it sets its own rules. Unlike the automobile, which regularly kills people, Google causes damage mostly by crowding out other alternatives. Because of its ease and power, because it does things so cheaply and conveniently, it may cause us to miss opportunities to do things better. Google’s presence in certain markets, such as advertising or book search, retards innovation and investment by potential competitors, because no one can realistically wrest attention or investment from Google. And when Google does something adequately and relatively cheaply in the service of the public, public institutions are relieved of pressure to perform their tasks well. This is an important and troubling phenomenon I call public failure.
The power of this young company is so impressive, and its apparent cost to its users so low (close to free), that the strongest negative emotion it generates in the United States is unease; anger at Google (as well as use of and dependence on Google) is much stronger in Europe. We see so clearly how it makes our lives better, our projects easier, and our world smaller that we fail to consider the costs, risks, options, and long-term consequences of our optimistic embrace. That is what the following chapters set out to do.
LIVING AND THINKING WITH GOOGLE
As with any system of belief, ideologies underlying the rise of Google have helped shape the worldview of those who created it as well as those who use and believe in it. For some, seeking wisdom and guidance in navigating the world in the early years of the twenty-first century, Google looks like the model for everything and the solution to every problem.7 To most people, Google seems helpful and benevolent. For some would-be reformers, particular practices of the company demand scrutiny within the faith. For apostates, Google has fallen from its heights of moral authority.8
Google’s ideological roots are well documented.9 Google’s founders and early employees believe deeply in the power of information technology to transform human consciousness, collective and individual. Less well understood are the theories that inform how Google interacts with us and how we interact with Google. Increasingly, Google is the lens through which we view the world. Google refracts, more than reflects, what we think is true and important. It filters and focuses our queries and explorations through the world of digitized information. It ranks and links so quickly and succinctly,
