<nettime> Hack the Google self.referentialism - Google Will Eat Itself

[Hans Bernhard <play@ubermorgen.com>]

Hack the Google self.referentialism - Google Will Eat Itself*


Bari/Vienna, 18 December 2005

How can a dictator be funny for the people? One chance is to know how  
to entertain the people, while continuing to influence every decision  
they make, so invisibly maintaining the totalitarian power untouched.

Google's management knows very well how to entertain surfers. They  
are not a (totalitarian) government, but they are the first, and  
almost only reference for most of the internet users. Moreover they  
periodically announce and release new, effective (and entertaining)  
services. People like these services. People want them and want even  
more of them.

It's not a Microsoft-like type of monopoly at all. On the Google  
planet everything works and is easy and funny. Everything is light  
(as the interface) and tasty (as the images search), resource-rich  
(as Gmail) or fast and updated (as Google News). So the "cream" of  
fun and the "strawberries" of interesting results are flavouring the  
Google dictatorship. In fact we're talking of a monopoly, or so, in a  
certain number of strategical net economy sectors.

The Google database is an incredibly valuable bunch of data. It's  
constituted by the most visited pages of the net. But they are  
selected through the Google's page rank algorithm. It's the paradigm  
of their self-referential game: the moment they had enough  
credibility they established the web filter criteria, and then, being  
the first source, they decided what the content of this source would be.

On the other hand the database of searches and the requests of other  
services (news, images, cheap prices, personal mail) is even much  
more relevant. In fact, it can be localized and statistically  
analyzed, and crossing locative, general and product searches,  
constitutes the secret dream of every Internet marketing executive.  
It deals to a frightening perspective of 'profiling' the Google's users.

The common perception is that Google offers chances of augmenting the  
personal information power in exchange of small and digestible amount  
of advertisement.

But all the recorded data (the queries and their respective users)  
are simply ignored by the users, which are hypnotized by an almost  
perfect virtual machine.

This funny empire has another crucial element: the advertisement.  
Goggle is the biggest player in the net advertisement business  
(actually adv is its core business). Being the most visited search  
engine, it attracts billions of users. Their billions of eyeballs are  
seeing Google's pages with the above mentioned textual advertisments,  
that everybody can fairly buy (AdWords).

On the other end, tons of people have become "publishers" through the  
giant blog phenomenon. So they are entitled to share the bits of  
profits through the Adsense program. They accept to display this tiny  
text advertisment in exchange of a small amount of money for every  
click on them. This process is protected and monitored for preventing  
abuse.

The final (actual) scenario is Google as the giant middleman. It  
sucks money from the advertisers offering a targeted portion of the  
global webspace. And it gives spare changes to the publishers for  
their collaboration. It sucks infos from the websites (and news,  
images, prices) and it releases it to the user's queries. Being in  
the middle it is more and more the unavoidable balancing center of  
the system. But we're not talking about a natural systems. We're  
talking about business and predominance.

Google's position is predominant in the same moment it enteres a new  
business field with a new service. It's the Google effect: creating  
consensus on a new business, even if it instantly gets the  
predominant position.

The greatest enemy of such a giant is not another giant: it's the  
parasite. If enough parasitites suck small amounts of money in this  
self-referentialism embodiment, they will empty this artificial  
mountain of data and its inner risk of digital totalitarianism.



http://www.gwei.org




* Text by Alessandro Ludovico feat. UBERMORGEN.COM vs. Paolo Cirio

--
Hans Bernhard
UBERMORGEN.COM

Skype Hans_Bernhard
Office +43 1 236 19 85
Mobile +43 650 930 00 61
Email hans@ubermorgen.com
Web www.ubermorgen.com

http://www.gwei.org


#  distributed via <nettime>: no commercial use without permission
#  <nettime> is a moderated mailing list for net criticism,
#  collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets
#  more info: majordomo@bbs.thing.net and "info nettime-l" in the msg body
#  archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nettime@bbs.thing.net