The Blind Giant

by Nick Harkaway

  The hope, then, was that the free (unfettered, not necessarily unpaid) flow of information would redeem a world staggering along in the aftermath of the greed-is-good culture of the 1980s and the sudden demise of the Cold War as the defining paradigm of our lives. The template for the perfect creative endeavour in this early stage of the commercial Internet was the garage band (a label subsequently appropriated by Apple for their bundled music production software). The idea was a group of musically talented individuals using digital technology to mix their work and the Internet to distribute it directly to the world without the involvement of a conventional industry power structure. There are echoes of this notion in Google’s founding, and in the small start-ups that can so rapidly ascend to the digital heights; Blogger, for example, was a side project which birthed an entire culture of online diarists and commentators.

  That may have seemed possible in the 1990s; now the situation is more complex and difficult. The massive number of people attempting the same thing makes discovery – making your creative product not just available but known about – rather than distribution, the barrier to success. More, as the share-and-share-alike attitude to content has proliferated, content has either become cheap or free, or it has been shared without permission of the creator. The downward pressure on price is so strong that many have given up charging directly altogether, and propose to make content available without monetary charge either on a simple advertising-funded model, on a merchandizing model where content induces fans to buy related material or hardware, or on a cross-subsidization model which sells the data generated by users as demographic information to advertisers.

  Online ads, however, sell for about one-tenth of their print counterparts, because the Internet has an endless supply of advertising hoardings. It turns out that these models require in most cases a huge number of visitors to a discrete website, or a distributed network of sites like a radio-telescope array, each contributing a small share to a larger entity. Similarly, merchandizing sales are not usually a reliable revenue stream. As an example: the Internet has spawned any number of webcomics – short strips of ongoing storylines, some in the comic-book style, others in the older three- or four-panel strip. Of these, a vanishingly small number are known to be self-sustaining, let alone actually profitable. Wikipedia lists a total of twenty-three creators presently reported by third parties to be making money from their work online. The cross-subsidy models, meanwhile, are undesirable in another way: cross-subsidization is essentially a bit of sleight of hand in which a service appears to be free, but is in fact paid in kind.

  What is presently emerging sometimes appears to be the opposite of the creative democracy: a centralization of the ability to profit from content, in which hubs such as Amazon, Google and Apple take a percentage of millions of sales and thrive on the creation of an ecosystem of app developers and content makers who rarely break even. It applies in every niche of the online world; one of the most talked about iPad apps of 2011 was Nursery Rhymes, by developer ustwo. This storybook app for children had a secret weapon: busy parents could call from elsewhere and read to the children they couldn’t be there for in person. The feature inspired all manner of positive and negative comment, the most pointed of which was probably the title of the review at CrunchGear: ‘Nursery Rhymes Storytime reminds you of the blasted lunar hellscape that is your life’. The app went to the top of the charts, and was discussed everywhere. The developer calculated the investment cost at £60k, and the money coming in at £26k – a shortfall of £34k. And that was a popular application; only a very, very few apps will do better.

  Apple, of course, profits from every single sale. The economics of the Internet, as presently constructed, do not favour the old dream of small content makers. Instead, they seem to produce an inevitable trend towards consolidation and gatekeeping. Rather than trading the fusty cultural chains of the conventional media for a bright new world of digital cottage industries, we are in danger of exchanging one bottleneck for another. Even the much touted original ebook writers such as the hugely successful Amanda Hocking work through a hub (Amazon) rather than going it alone – and Hocking herself has now signed with a conventional publisher.

  The Internet is sometimes heralded as the end of the middleman. In fact, at the moment, it’s more like the ascension of the middleman to an almost godlike status – it’s just that the old middlemen have in many cases been cut out of the loop. And while aggregate sales of every app, song, movie or book are enormous – and the hubs take a piece of each sale – the individual sales of an individual product may not be enough to pay for its production.

  The present Net style of commerce favours the giants – just as the old pre-digital one does – and in some ways, it is defined and created by one in particular.

  It is pointless to discuss the Internet age and its cultures without reference to Google. The search giant is at the heart of how we use the web, and its rise – not by chance – is coincident with the rise of the Internet as a part of everyday life. It can’t be said too often, not just in relation to Google but in general, that there is no set outcome of digital and technological evolution. What we choose now will affect what happens next. The future is in flux, and we are – more consciously than ever before – choosing a path ahead as we choose small conveniences and commercial options. So we should make even quite minor choices about digital matters with some care.

  Google defined the Internet we have now by making possible real search. Before Google, finding things on the web was, if not difficult, at best unwieldy. Search companies didn’t actually want you to find what you were looking for too fast: their goal was to have you on their pages long enough to advertise to you. Early search sites were portals, hoping to hold your eyes for a while before letting you go. The key property in commercial web design back then was ‘stickiness’. At the same time, the order in which searches were displayed was arbitrary or even perverse. AltaVista searches ranked results by the number of times a term appeared on a given page, so a site which featured ‘goal’ sixteen times was deemed more relevant to a search for ‘goal’ than one which used it only ten. You can still find, on old personal pages from the early days of the web, buried repetitions of words, white text on white background: ‘goal goal goal goal goal …’ going on and on for hundreds of lines in an effort to attract the search engine’s attention. It’s one of the earliest and crudest forms of what is today an industry in itself: Search Engine Optimization.

  Google, by allowing the web itself to do the work of ranking pages – Google’s method begins with letting the number of links to a given site determine how important it is – got around all that, and set itself the task of getting people where they wanted to go as fast as possible, without attempting to detain them for advertising purposes. That efficiency is the core of the Google identity: make it work properly first, then figure out how to make money from it.

  That’s not to say that the company didn’t have advertising at its heart from the very beginning, only that the model then in use was weak and ineffectual and they eschewed it in favour of something cleverer and more elegant: targeted ads based on user data, ads which could monitor their own effectiveness and charge by the click – the moment of conversion of ad space to interest – rather than by an arbitrary notion of the number of eyeballs skating across a page. Google abandoned stickiness for helpfulness, for speeding you through to your destination – in exchange for information about, and ultimately the possibility of a degree of control over, that destination.

  Google is the more important because its ethos is drawn from and massively influential upon the culture of the Internet itself (though, like the notion of ‘mainstream culture’, that means nothing more than the overlapping of a million unique fragments of online subculture). It is the product of that same transformative dream of the early days of digital computing, but has in some ways a clearer understanding of the world and a stronger perception of itself, albeit one that is occasionally strikingly
blinkered. Google is unashamedly elitist – you could say ‘meritocratic’ if you prefer – hiring only the best, keeping itself to itself. The company’s mission is to ‘make information accessible’, and this is in its worldview an unchallenged good. At the heart of an intellect- and skill-driven enterprise, which has raised efficiency and fact-based decision-making to a new height, and which despises intangibles and fuzziness and tricks of the human mind such as marketing, there is a single tenet based on faith.

  Google is an island in the Net, a green land of massages and wind turbines and great food, where employees are encouraged to develop their own projects and bring them to the world through Google’s own system of godmothering. It is the company which cares about not ‘being evil’, though it is not always able to avoid the pitfalls of commercial need or mission creep, or the annoying greyness of human life which can suck the clarity from Google’s black and white. In many ways it is the model for what a twenty-first-century corporation ought to be: rewarding, protective, collegial, environmentally sound, innovative – and determined to make a moral calculus part of or even central to its decision-making. It is also, ultimately, a faith-based techno-capitalist entity premised on the idea that more access to whatever information exists is better, and that anything which stands in the way of that is old-fashioned and reactionary and should be washed away. This has inevitably brought it into conflict with media content industries which derive income directly from consumers rather than by selling their attention to advertisers – technology writer James Gleick wrote recently in the New York Review of Books that the currency of the Internet is not information but attention – and it will continue to do so. Google is a feature of the digital landscape, a determinator as well as an indicator of how the Internet culture sees the world.

  Google has also been accused of deliberately fostering and profiting from unlawful use of copyright material, and of wrecking the newspaper industry by taking over the ad revenue stream on which that industry somewhat depended and by aggregating the content newspapers were encouraged to put online free of charge in the 1990s. To some extent, the company seems to recognize its culpability in the fall of newspaper revenues: Eric Schmidt talked recently about finding ways to pump money into news. Say anything you like about Google, but do not ever imagine that the people who work there are stupid. They are occasionally single-minded, and not immune to error, but they are among the most intelligent people in the world.

  In many ways, Google is a microcosm of the Internet as a whole: a force multiplier, a facilitator, an accelerator, a feedback system and a paradigm changer. The start-up incorporated in 1998 by Larry Page and Sergey Brin is now the Behemoth of the online world. It has radically reshaped the advertising market, changed the way we get news and weather, and how we navigate. It has been part of the staggering changes in the music industry, and moved into the world of publishing with the attempt to secure a deal to sell books online which was so innovative – and, to some, alarming – that it would have required an Act of Congress to make it possible. Had it gone through, it would have called into question one of the basic tenets of intellectual property on which much of the media, including Google itself, relies.

  Where Google treads, the earth shakes.

  The fundamental thing about Google, though, often goes unremarked: the Google project has barely begun. Domination of search – and, by extension, of advertising – is a means to an end. Google, at least notionally, views the world not primarily as a market but as something to be made better. Money, Eric Schmidt once remarked, is just a technology to help do that. It’s an oft-quoted maxim of the company’s founders that you can’t change the users, so you have to change the system, but in fact the goal of Google is exactly that: to educate, to liberate, to inform and to uplift. Ultimately, to improve us all. Its founders candidly envisage a world where Google and the Internet are fed directly into the brain; where to wonder something can be to know the answer; where humanity is so thoroughly blended with its own technology that it’s hard to see where one ends and the other begins.

  This kind of dream is precisely where many people stop paying attention: it sounds too far-fetched to be serious. But you cannot hope to understand Google or the world which is being formed around you unless you are prepared to contemplate this kind of possibility and to grasp that it isn’t metaphor, and it isn’t a priori impossible. It’s a technical and an engineering challenge, and research that could bring it about is under way – and in some cases quite far advanced – all over the world. Do not dismiss the notion as fanciful or laughable. It is neither, and the time to ask whether it’s a good idea as well as a fascinating one is now.

  More mundanely, in the words of Douglas Edwards, author of I’m Feeling Lucky: The Confessions of Google Employee Number 59:

  They would build a company to fix large-scale problems affecting millions of people and terraform the entire landscape of human knowledge. They would speed medical breakthroughs, accelerate the exploration of space, break down language barriers … they would clear the clogged arteries of the world’s data systems and move information effortlessly to the point at which it was needed at exactly the time at which it was required. They would be … an information conglomerate on the scale of General Electric.

  The dream is Napoleonic, even Messianic. And a faith in that goal is part of the culture. Google is exceptional (genuinely, in many ways it’s the template of the kind of company we should beg to have more of). Like the country that nurtured it, it feels it has a special place in the world – and occasionally finds that the rest of the world receives its painful yet well-intended interventions with less than wholehearted cheer.

  That perception of exceptional status seems to lead to a kind of blindness or indifference, too. Edwards also tells us that Larry Page thinks frequent flier programmes are evil. Why? ‘They incentivise people to take flights that are not the most direct or the cheapest, just so they can earn points.’ In other words, frequent flier programmes damage the consumer’s ability to assess which flight is the best for them. They mess with the flow of information in the system, corrupt the user’s ability to understand what is the best deal. Which to me makes them a lot like cross-subsidized revenues: services such as Google’s core search function, which are free at the point of use but take payment elsewhere in a way which is not obvious to the consumer.

  So the corporate DNA of Google is in the first instance transformative. It seeks to make everything more efficient and simpler. The practical consequence of this is the cutting out of the conventional middleman – known these days by the more technical-sounding term ‘disintermediation’. Google comes into a market, disintermediates someone, and connects the supplier directly – well, through Google – with the customer. On the face of it, that must be a good thing for everyone; or, at least, anyone whose job does not depend on being a middleman. In reality, the fallible, messy human systems known as culture have often grown up around inefficient and unnecessarily complex ways of doing business. Google’s Gordian solutions are not always welcome or even necessarily positive. In the long term, it’s possible (though not knowable) that Google’s effects on the various industries it has touched will be positive – and that seems to be an article of faith with those inside the door. But in the short term what economists call disruption or ‘creative destruction’, and Google sees as the cutting away of inefficiency, translates in the real world into lost jobs, reduced revenues for huge companies and the slow, painful demise of the newspaper industry as it struggles to deal with content aggregators, the loss of ad sales and the balkanization of its audience.

  The company falls victim to an old, familiar failing of visionaries and engineers: the One Big Fix. Google likes to operate at a global level, doing deals in bulk. The Google Book Settlement – which I mentioned earlier, and which is still rumbling on – is a case in point. It’s a meandering and somewhat convoluted story, but these are the bones: in 2002 Google began digitizing books in libraries, and in 2004
launched a Book Search service which allowed users to search what it had digitized. As well as the whole of any public domain text, Book Search would display snippets of any work in the database but still under copyright that was relevant to the search. In 2005 Google was sued by several distinct groups for copyright infringement. The cases became a class action – US law allows for the creation of a single suit which is representative of a class of suits and deals with all of them at once – and instead of taking the case to court to fight on the merits of the situation, the parties opted to attempt to create an extraordinary new deal under which Google would create a massive library and retailer of copyright works. Essentially, it was an attempt to gain the right to trade in the majority of books ever written, even or especially those whose ownership was unclear. The Amended Settlement Agreement was rejected on very narrow legal grounds: it attempted to give Google permission to act in a given way in future, which Judge Denny Chin ruled was beyond the scope of what the court could permit. The various other objections therefore remain untested.

  Litigation and calls for changes in legislation are a fascinating recurring pattern in digital commerce. Because the legal structures of our society have grown up in tandem with the industries they regulate and serve – and which, of course, they also create in the same way that the rules of football create the game – they are often disadvantageous to new arrivals with new agendas and desires. The response of digital businesses, quite often, is to demand a ‘levelling’ of the playing field which actually entails the destruction of the old business model in favour of one which favours the new paradigm. The Google Book Settlement was one example, but there are others; Google Music, until very recently, was bogged down because the company wanted to negotiate for huge bundles of content where the industry does deals on a one-to-one basis, with different contractual provisions for different artists. Google’s energy is directed at large-scale solutions to large problems, grand answers. In physical terms, the company likes to build machines that are visible from space – but much of the world’s population still lives in the areas through which these titanic engines must pass.