Just Google It

It may just be all the WikiLeaks I've been smoking, or the fact that I'm the type of person so opposed to change that I refused to change my clocks for Daylight Savings Time till I was in high school, but I don't trust Google.  It's way too easy to compare it to a virus with late-stage symptoms: Infect everything first, then start charging money.

I would make these observations on YouTube, where it is now compulsory to create a Google+ account for the privilege of posting comments, except that I refuse to create such an account and cannot therefore comment about it.  I know I'm only cutting myself off and have no one else to blame for it.  But I already had to disentangle myself from a Google account to which I hadn't even realized I was signing myself, and now Google has its preliminary hooks in me—which, ironically, is the reason I'm even able to write this blog—and I don't want to get in any deeper than I have to.  Besides, it's a matter of principle.  Or thickheaded stubbornness.  Whichever.

Here's my problem with the situation:  The Internet—bless its terrifying, unfettered disarray of a soul—is the greatest agent of free speech we have in what we call the free world.  And now it's become the necessity of every functioning member of such a society to have access to it.  So if you cut off freedom of speech from the internet it's like cutting off circulation from the heart.

It seems impossible to americans, because our government is subject to our scrutiny (when we take the time to watch it) and because it's supposed to protect the first amendment—and because the internet is already so far along, how could anyone possibly hope to contain it?

But it's not as far-fetched as you might think.  Many countries, like Australia and Germany, have actually tried to pass laws enabling mass censorship by making filters—the kind typically used by parents to protect their children from unwanted content—mandatory.  Once such filters are set up, it's not a huge leap for governments or corporations to pick and choose what "extraneous" material they'd like to see blocked from public view.  (Even, say, blogs that try to point out the hypocrisy of the lists . . .)

And then in the case of Google, it is not the government but a corporation taking control.  And let me remind you, corporations recognize no laws save the law of Supply and Demand.  Not in this country.  Okay, yes, we do have things like rules about minimum wage and such, but for the most part we're a pretty straightforward capitalist nation.  —Which, by the way, I pretty much agree with:  Just as the freedom to say what you want is important, so is the freedom to spend what you want.  But now we have this interesting dilemma on our hands, where one might actually infringe upon the other.

And I find it somewhat ironic, if not directly intriguing, that the corporation in question is Google, famous first and foremost for its search engine, the search engine so widely used that the verb "google" had to be added to the dictionary.  The same company that informs millions of people about what the internet has to say is now the company that decides who gets a say on YouTube, one of the most popular websites in existence.  The common man, having become virtually helpless to learn anything without Google, could potentially become dependent on Google to say anything as well.

Imagine a world where everyone has to pay a fee and provide personal information to a faceless organization, just for the privilege of adding their thoughts to the only media pool anyone really consults anymore.  Imagine if this faceless organization accepted money from other companies in exchange for access to personal information.  How far might it go?  What if the organization started taking money for censoring comments that displeased its clients?  . . . Frankly, I think a better question would be, How far have things gone already?

Who has your personal information?  We already know the government enjoys its internet surveillance (thank you, Snowden) and now we see freedom of speech limited by our willingness to cooperate with Google!  We don't have to pay for it yet, but what happens when we do?  If anyone knows how to stop this from happening I'd love to hear about it.

(. . . And, while you're at it, could you also tell me what it is exactly that Google provides, besides a massively popular search engine, that has made it so indispensable?  Because I seem to remember having an email, social network, and YouTube account long before Google came along and produced worse versions of all of them.)

We think of the internet as an autonomous, objective network of organized chaos—"the largest experiment in anarchy that we have ever had"(Eric Schmidt).  At the moment, it is.  But even as it provides us with near-infinite freedom of speech it also swiftly becomes our only effective outlet for that freedom, and under such circumstances we become enslaved to it.  We become a society that has no choice but to accept what it googles.  So we can either learn an innovative new form of mass-communication that doesn't involve Wi-Fi, or we can find some way of keeping our internet in a state of glorious and unbridled anarchy, free of censorship.  It's our choice.