20051030
Google Civilization
Google does not intend to compete with existing publishers for existing markets.
Publishing as I understand it is, for the most part, an ordinary business like a bakery, with the caveat that many of its employees think of their industry as charitable and culturally important. Google’s publishing experiments need to be considered in light of their stated ambition to organize and make available all of the world’s information, which a few people at Google have estimated will take 300 years. The estimate makes a flashy sound bite, but I think it accurately reflects Google’s directors’ thinking. Google is one of few organizations in the world whose directors think on a scale of centuries.
Google’s ambitions are international, secular, philosophical, and historical, embodying an ethos that harks back to the European Enlightenment in its elitism and energy, with the flexibility and strength of 19C, 20C, and 21C engineering and information sciences to support their confidence.
About five thousand people work at Google, so any individual employee there is almost literally “one in a million.” Few organizations have ever leveraged the labor of five thousand people as successfully and influentially as Google has, especially in such a short time. (Google’s seventh birthday was in September 2005.)
George Dyson in an Edge essay says Google reminds him of a 14C European cathedral as it’s being built in the 12C. When I’m optimistic, it reminds me of the glory days of Attic Greece, when a confident, educated population of citizens could establish a civilization by fiat. They could make it. Civilization civilizes by example, by being more desirable than any alternatives available to people nearby.
At its most ordinary and in its most likely historical development, Google is a late-20C U.S. corporation that manages data on digital computers and sells advertising based on its management. It’s a big business. But on its better days, Google might be a harbinger for a better civilization.
Publishing as I understand it is, for the most part, an ordinary business like a bakery, with the caveat that many of its employees think of their industry as charitable and culturally important. Google’s publishing experiments need to be considered in light of their stated ambition to organize and make available all of the world’s information, which a few people at Google have estimated will take 300 years. The estimate makes a flashy sound bite, but I think it accurately reflects Google’s directors’ thinking. Google is one of few organizations in the world whose directors think on a scale of centuries.
Google’s ambitions are international, secular, philosophical, and historical, embodying an ethos that harks back to the European Enlightenment in its elitism and energy, with the flexibility and strength of 19C, 20C, and 21C engineering and information sciences to support their confidence.
About five thousand people work at Google, so any individual employee there is almost literally “one in a million.” Few organizations have ever leveraged the labor of five thousand people as successfully and influentially as Google has, especially in such a short time. (Google’s seventh birthday was in September 2005.)
George Dyson in an Edge essay says Google reminds him of a 14C European cathedral as it’s being built in the 12C. When I’m optimistic, it reminds me of the glory days of Attic Greece, when a confident, educated population of citizens could establish a civilization by fiat. They could make it. Civilization civilizes by example, by being more desirable than any alternatives available to people nearby.
At its most ordinary and in its most likely historical development, Google is a late-20C U.S. corporation that manages data on digital computers and sells advertising based on its management. It’s a big business. But on its better days, Google might be a harbinger for a better civilization.
Comments:
The real value of Google, Blogger, and the Internet in general is not the providing of a vast sandbox of idle chatter, but the posting of the raw material for enlisting citizens in a SINGLE World Citizen Congress. From this single basic organization many smaller communications groups can be spawned in an orderly useful manner.
If you ae interested in such a single citizen organization, you must visit the only site that describes such an organization and its ultimate objectives and offers a plan and a site to register its beginnings. This is at LetsOrganize.blogspot.com.
Cheers to all good citizens.
If you ae interested in such a single citizen organization, you must visit the only site that describes such an organization and its ultimate objectives and offers a plan and a site to register its beginnings. This is at LetsOrganize.blogspot.com.
Cheers to all good citizens.
do you think the publishers have a legitimate concern? what's the best case scenario for everyone involved? what changes (realitic or fantastic) would need to happen to make this an acceptable proposition?
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