[Very interesting essay about Google, history, and the nature of photography. -egg]<\/p>\n
Google is productive, incessant, monstrous, and very enthusiastic about itself. The company\u2019s bright-eyed but curiously unreassuring motto is \u201cDon\u2019t Be Evil.\u201d In The New Digital Age, the recent book by executive chairman Eric Schmidt and the director of Google Ideas, Jared Cohen, we find the following words: \u201cThe best thing anyone can do to improve the quality of life around the world is to drive connectivity and technological opportunity.\u201d This might almost read as a Panglossian parody of technological optimism, were it not so earnestly meant. And so, Google grows, it makes new things, it makes the world more interesting, though not always to the good. Under the guidance of its founders and of guru-like software engineers like Jeff Dean and Sanjay Ghemawat, it brings abstractions and a whole new level of automation into computer science, and helps sustain our current age of frenzied information collection, massive computation, and feral capitalism.Google tried to do everything. It proved itself the deepest and fastest of the search engines. It stomped the competition in email. It made a decent showing in image hosting, and a good one in chat. It stumbled on social, but utterly owned maps. It swallowed libraries whole and sent tremors across the copyright laws. It knows where you are right now, and what you\u2019re doing, and what you\u2019ll probably do next. It added an indelible, funny, loose-limbed and exact verb into the vocabulary: to google. No one bings or yahoos anything. And it finishes your sen\u2026All of a sudden, one day, a few years ago, there was Google Image Search. Words typed into the search box could deliver pages of images. I remember the first time I saw this, and what I felt: fear. I knew then that the monster had taken over.<\/p>\n