Source: LewRockwell.com
In 2005, John Battelle, one of the original editors of Wired magazine, published an excellent anthropology of the Internet entitled The Search: How Google and Its Rivals Rewrote the Rules of Business and Transformed Our Culture.
Wired magazine is awful, woke propaganda today. Google is awful, woke propaganda today. Before these companies were awful, they were great.
Battelle and his book, which I have not read in years, but which still leaves an impact on me, represents some of the great things about the vision behind Wired and some of the great things about the vision behind Google.
I am not a Luddite who hates all technology. I hate evil uses of technology. And what has become of Google is evil.
I would like to encourage you to not be a Luddite around innovation, but to be able to have a sense of the tech tools that are beneficial to your goals. It is important to be able, as well, to be able to distinguish between those and tools that are designed and wielded with an effort to bring ruin to good people. Google has not always been weirded as a tool to bring ruin to good people.
How Google Almost Changed The World
Google’s original algorithm, written by Larry Page as a student, is brilliant. It uses math to ask and answer this beautiful question: “How do I give the person searching exactly what that person wants?”
What a powerful question.
That is a question that empowers the individual.
Change is not bad. It is bad change that is bad.
And somewhere around 2015, Google, as an organization, abandoned that powerful mission when that question was supplanted at Google by a faction seeking to ask a different question: “How do I give the person searching exactly what I want him to see?”…