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Sunday, January 29, 2006Let them google "luxury car"... and the Chinese revolution will come.During the Cold War, there were a lot of actors who weren't sure which vision they wanted to triumph. Most just made anti-anti-communist noises, but some were open sympathizers. Some folks went so far as to visit Castro and declare him a nice guy even as they warned that the U.S. should bow out of the Cold War because we would be annihilated. It was never clear to me why these nice, sensible and horribly misrepresented dicators had to be obeyed lest they squish us like bugs, but I was a young man, so perhaps I misunderstood the seeming contradiction. Without Hollywood, we wouldn't have won the Cold War. The funny thing is, while our actors and directors may have had leftist leanings, they were in a business that was unavoidably capitalist: The best way to keep score in a town better described as an unending popularity contest than a city was salary per role and gross per film. Hollywood made movies that would sell and sell anybody. Because that's how you got your name in lights. The glamor of Hollywood was the flipside of the socialist realism of the communist enterprise. It painted a picture of the world that the Russians liked. Blue jeans, rock and roll, lives of abundance - left-wing communist sympathizers aplenty spent their lives making commercials for the American way. When the Soviet government found itself locked in an arms race with the United States, they couldn't provide that abundance. And so when they faltered, the people did not rush to save their system, but let it fall away in relief, and with hope that maybe the American way, or at least the European way, would now be open to them. * * * Google signed on with the Chi-comms. Some are sufficiently upset to have canceled their google ads, use a different engine, whatever. This is silly, unless you believe the power of Google rests in Google. That's like thinking that what moved us from Hollywood was the political thought of the actors. Google is a success because it enables people to find the stuff they want. Some of that is information. Some of that is stuff. All of it is liberating. When you can't find what you want on Google, you don't development a resigned contentment because it must not exist after all; you keep searching - checking back, rephrasing and letting the thought irritate till you discover something new and exciting. A restricted Google in China beats the hell out of no Google. It is the internet version of Hollywood, suggesting a world with so much more than what surfers in rural outposts could imagine. Who cares if you can't find liberty or human rights. People running those searches know already; people who don't have no need of them. The Soviet Union didn't fall because people were angry that they couldn't read the Declaration of Independence. It fell because the people couldn't find decent food or housing but had been exposed to the idea of a world where these were plentiful. Where poor people often still had cars and everybody expected at least three choices of each item in the supermarket. Where rich people might be evil or terrible, but at least they didn't haul away your family and stuff in the dead of night (usually). Here's where I would say fooey on Google over the China issue: If they - don't run ads don't let you look up cars or car stereos block sites with people whose teeth are clean and shiny or clothes are stylish Google stood up to the U.S. government because searching for what you want unobserved sells in the United States. Google didn't stand up to the Chinese because there's no money in linking to human rights sites anyway. Should we be outraged? Should we be appalled? If we think of Google as a moral agent for whom "Do no evil" was more than a slogan, we can get our dander up, of course. But realistically, Google is a business and to be treated as such. Because it is a business, it will take actions to make money where it can, including China. And that means China's in deep doo-doo, the more the people who use Google. Google is the ultimate tool for the information consumerist. It sells information access. It sells the service of putting your information up top. It pays for delivering its information (GoogleAds) to make money off a major segment of its customers. In every way, Google is about creating a world where the individual at the keyboard makes choices and comes to expect that the things he or she wants will at least in the internet domain probably be available. As I say, I don't care if you can't use Google in China to find out how bad the government is. If you can find out about the stuff Americans, Europeans and the Japanese take for granted, you can figure that out. In sheltering the Chinese from info about just how bad the Chi-comms are, Google may be doing a little evil. But by being what it is, it's an incredible threat to the Chinese, no matter how they try to rework it. And that's a very good thing. 
posted by gbarto at 1:40 PM |
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