Where Does Google Begin, And We Leave Off?

The commensualistic relationship between Google and us, the edglings that inhabit the web, leads to all manner of confusion and insights.

William Gibson worries that we are unpaid for the social gestures that we festoon the web with, such as links, that Google’s refinery converts into search engine gold. He goes so far as to say, poetically, that Google is made of us:

Google is made of us, a sort of coral reef of human minds and their products.

via Google’s Earth

David Weinberger clarifies the relationship, but raises a deeper question about Google’s potentially negative impact on our web ecology:

David Weinberger, What’s ours in the Age of Google?

So, whats confusing about Google is that it feels so much like it is ours — for us, like us, of us. it is not just another entity in our ecology but is an important enabler of it. But, we also know that it’s a corporation out to make money. We don’t know how to make sense of this so long as we hold both sides of what, traditionally, would be a paradox. As Gibson says, we have not seen its like before.

The confusing part reflects the hope: Perhaps in this new world were building for one another on line, we can get past the age-old assumed alienation of business from customer. The Net is ours. We built it for ourselves and for one another. We’ve done so using collaborative techniques few would have predicted would have worked. The Net is ours profoundly. Google has seemed to be the one BigCo that genuinely understands that — understands it beyond a mere alignment of interests dayenu!, understands the depth and importance of the way in which the Net is ours.

So, when Google acts in a way that seems to benefit itself but not us — arguably in its initial proposed Google Books settlement and the Googizon proposal — the violence of the shock measures the depth of our belief that Google is ours — for us, like us, of us. If even Google is not ours, is there then no hope that this time, in this new world, we can get past the structural antagonisms and distrust that have characterized the old world of our economy and culture?

Perhaps if Google were clearly committed to being a ‘forporation’ (as Umair haque styles it), a corporation dedicated to advancing certain principles, and not just another C corporation, perhaps then we might be less worried.

Google has become so large, and so entwined in our experience and economics, perhaps it is inevitable that it casts a shadow and starts to feel like some outside force, like gravity, clearly beyond out control and around which we simply have to adapt.

And I have no faith in the US or other governments to compel Google to do no harm, even if we could define exactly what that is.