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Note to self: if I think I’ve made an exam too easy, I’m almost certainly wrong.
Siva Vaidhyanathan, The Googlization of Everything (And Why We Should Worry): Google knows us better than we know ourselves. True story: my husband was answering a question from my son about the Large Hadron Collider (the source of the hottest temperatures we know of in the universe!) and started typing into Google search on his iPhone. By the time he finished “large,” the first suggestion—the first--was “large hadron collider,” a search term he could not recall using before. That’s freaky. And cool.
Vaidhyanathan argues that we’ve been distracted by the coolness and the freakiness from asking fundamental questions about Google’s proper role in organizing the world’s information. He argues that Google filled a vacuum created by public failure, a failure of government orchestrated by private interests in order to get the power to do what they wanted, often worse than government would have done. The political dynamic is: starve government and appoint incompetents (e.g., Hurricane Katrina), then use that to prove that government should be cut further. Meanwhile, people who are wealthy and informed enough to do so encouraged to choose “responsible” corporate providers like The Body Shop even though that doesn’t help all the animals/people caught up in producing the average unit of shampoo etc. Consumption, he argues, is not a substitute for citizenship, and by punting to private actors like Google we’re making a huge mistake of governance even if Google is (currently) well-intentioned. Eric Schmidt of Google thus preaches the same deregulatory bunk that got us the banking crisis.
We trust Google because it seems magic and we think we’re good searchers, even though we have no idea what the Google secret sauce is and most of us aren’t really good at distinguishing paid from organic results. Vaidhyanathan acknowledges that Google’s done a lot of good things, but there are also costs. Google’s withdrawal from China increased the scope of the Chinese government’s control over information (though he also argues that Google’s presence wouldn’t have been transformative either; prefiguring The Net Delusion, which I’m in the middle of now).
It’s a disturbing and often persuasive argument. Vaidhyanathan’s few unforced errors (for some reason, he thinks it’s not easy to exclude particular search engines from indexing your site and that you will have to make an up/down decision on them all together; it’s true that many people may not know about robot exclusion headers, but every explanation of them I’ve ever seen made it clear that you can exclude or allow particular bots at will), don’t go to the core of his argument. Unsurprisingly, I’m in greatest disagreement with him over Google Books: he says that offering the settlement makes Google’s fair use argument harder because Google conceded that it couldn’t do what it wanted without copyright owners’ permission, but this is really wrong, both in general and in specific. In general, we want to encourage settlement negotiations and therefore don’t treat them as admissions of wrongdoing, and in specific, the now-rejected settlement went much farther than Google’s initial scanning, as to which the fair use argument remains the same. He also says that the corpus hasn’t proven its value to research, which is (a) pretty early to be making that call, and (b) inconsistent with what I’ve read even with the early results. That said, he makes a good case that a government-scanned library could be more secure and open than Google Books proposed to be.
More generally, Vaidhyanathan is weirdly willing to accept the idea that companies have no responsibility to anyone but their shareholders—not their employees, their customers, or their society—and I think that’s a failure of imagination and history just as much as the assumption that government can’t do big things is. The idea that shareholder profits are all that matter is historically specific and economically catastrophic; “don’t be evil” could and should really mean something for corporations as well as for governments.
Carol Tavris & Elliot Aronson, Mistakes Were Made (But Not by Me): Why We Justify Foolish Beliefs, Bad Decisions, and Hurtful Acts: Readable book about cognitive dissonance and how we fool ourselves to smooth off the edges of our own behavior and slide down the slippery slope from small transgressions to big ones, justifying everything from affairs to torture. Unexpected case in point: Doing a favor for someone makes you like them more, because you tell yourself that you wouldn’t have done a favor for a jerk. There’s also discussion of the malleability of human memory and how various people were tragically misled into thinking that most instances of child sexual abuse were repressed and then recovered rather than remembered all along. The ending suggestions for avoiding the dynamics of self-justification are difficult, but the authors make the excellent point that people who like you already will like you more for straight-up admitting error rather than losing respect for you.
Siva Vaidhyanathan, The Googlization of Everything (And Why We Should Worry): Google knows us better than we know ourselves. True story: my husband was answering a question from my son about the Large Hadron Collider (the source of the hottest temperatures we know of in the universe!) and started typing into Google search on his iPhone. By the time he finished “large,” the first suggestion—the first--was “large hadron collider,” a search term he could not recall using before. That’s freaky. And cool.
Vaidhyanathan argues that we’ve been distracted by the coolness and the freakiness from asking fundamental questions about Google’s proper role in organizing the world’s information. He argues that Google filled a vacuum created by public failure, a failure of government orchestrated by private interests in order to get the power to do what they wanted, often worse than government would have done. The political dynamic is: starve government and appoint incompetents (e.g., Hurricane Katrina), then use that to prove that government should be cut further. Meanwhile, people who are wealthy and informed enough to do so encouraged to choose “responsible” corporate providers like The Body Shop even though that doesn’t help all the animals/people caught up in producing the average unit of shampoo etc. Consumption, he argues, is not a substitute for citizenship, and by punting to private actors like Google we’re making a huge mistake of governance even if Google is (currently) well-intentioned. Eric Schmidt of Google thus preaches the same deregulatory bunk that got us the banking crisis.
We trust Google because it seems magic and we think we’re good searchers, even though we have no idea what the Google secret sauce is and most of us aren’t really good at distinguishing paid from organic results. Vaidhyanathan acknowledges that Google’s done a lot of good things, but there are also costs. Google’s withdrawal from China increased the scope of the Chinese government’s control over information (though he also argues that Google’s presence wouldn’t have been transformative either; prefiguring The Net Delusion, which I’m in the middle of now).
It’s a disturbing and often persuasive argument. Vaidhyanathan’s few unforced errors (for some reason, he thinks it’s not easy to exclude particular search engines from indexing your site and that you will have to make an up/down decision on them all together; it’s true that many people may not know about robot exclusion headers, but every explanation of them I’ve ever seen made it clear that you can exclude or allow particular bots at will), don’t go to the core of his argument. Unsurprisingly, I’m in greatest disagreement with him over Google Books: he says that offering the settlement makes Google’s fair use argument harder because Google conceded that it couldn’t do what it wanted without copyright owners’ permission, but this is really wrong, both in general and in specific. In general, we want to encourage settlement negotiations and therefore don’t treat them as admissions of wrongdoing, and in specific, the now-rejected settlement went much farther than Google’s initial scanning, as to which the fair use argument remains the same. He also says that the corpus hasn’t proven its value to research, which is (a) pretty early to be making that call, and (b) inconsistent with what I’ve read even with the early results. That said, he makes a good case that a government-scanned library could be more secure and open than Google Books proposed to be.
More generally, Vaidhyanathan is weirdly willing to accept the idea that companies have no responsibility to anyone but their shareholders—not their employees, their customers, or their society—and I think that’s a failure of imagination and history just as much as the assumption that government can’t do big things is. The idea that shareholder profits are all that matter is historically specific and economically catastrophic; “don’t be evil” could and should really mean something for corporations as well as for governments.
Carol Tavris & Elliot Aronson, Mistakes Were Made (But Not by Me): Why We Justify Foolish Beliefs, Bad Decisions, and Hurtful Acts: Readable book about cognitive dissonance and how we fool ourselves to smooth off the edges of our own behavior and slide down the slippery slope from small transgressions to big ones, justifying everything from affairs to torture. Unexpected case in point: Doing a favor for someone makes you like them more, because you tell yourself that you wouldn’t have done a favor for a jerk. There’s also discussion of the malleability of human memory and how various people were tragically misled into thinking that most instances of child sexual abuse were repressed and then recovered rather than remembered all along. The ending suggestions for avoiding the dynamics of self-justification are difficult, but the authors make the excellent point that people who like you already will like you more for straight-up admitting error rather than losing respect for you.
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corporate ethics
Especially if we're granting them freaking civil rights for some unfathomable reason. Hugely wealthy and powerful "citizens" with free speech, legal protections, and a legal obligation to be as selfish as possible? You'd think individuals, even rich individuals, would be horrified by the idea. But mine is a mere lament, and you have ideas about how we could ask for more from corporations: I want to hear about it!
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Re: corporate ethics