These days Google seems a bit like the Vatican without the great sense of style. It didn’t even have enough style to spell Googol correctly. Now it’s all about libido dominandi.
The Internet of the late nineteen-nineties was a flea market run by men who had recently discovered animated lettering. Search engines had the discernment of Labrador puppies: ask for Plato and they returned plumbing supplies, pornography, and a holiday in Tampa.
Then Google appeared. Google began by being genuinely useful—at first.
One blank page, one box, scarcely a logo. It possessed the unnerving manners of a very clever waiter: discreet, quick, and apparently uninterested in your wallet. Its ambition—to organize the world’s information—sounded preposterous, but also noble if not quite chivalrous.
And Google worked.
Search turned ignorance into a temporary inconvenience. Gmail gave everyone more storage than dignity required. Maps ended the ancient marital ritual of arguing beside a roundabout. Translate enabled millions to order dinner incorrectly in forty languages. Docs made it possible for twelve people to ruin the same sentence simultaneously. YouTube assembled the largest collection of human expression ever created, then discovered that what humanity most wished to express was outrage, makeup advice, and footage of dogs mistrusting cucumbers.
These were splendid inventions. That is important. Nobody is seduced by a bad mousetrap.
The transaction revealed itself slowly. First Google was helpful; then indispensable; then ambient. We stopped visiting it and began living inside it. Our correspondence, photographs, journeys, curiosities, appointments, mistakes, and late-night symptoms accumulated in its servers like confession in a church that had quietly been purchased by an advertising agency.
The company’s real product was not search. It was surrender, prettily packaged as convenience.
“Don’t be evil” once decorated Google’s conscience like a humorous sampler in a student kitchen. The phrase was charming because it implied evil would be obvious: a black cape, perhaps, or a trapdoor. But modern corporate wickedness rarely strokes a cat. It adjusts a default setting. It accepts the terms on your behalf. It places a promoted answer above the useful one, takes a commission from the app, follows you across the Web, and calls the resulting dossier “personalization.”
Google did not become monstrous by abandoning its intelligence. It became monstrous by applying that intelligence perfectly. It learned that dependence is more profitable than delight, that surveillance sounds friendlier when renamed relevance, and that a monopoly need not lock the door if everyone has forgotten where the door is.
There remains much to admire. Maps still finds the street. Translate still crosses borders. Search still produces, somewhere beneath the advertisements, an answer. The tragedy is not that Google’s gifts were fraudulent. The gifts were real. They improved daily life, expanded access to knowledge, and made the miraculous feel pleasantly routine.
Then Google itemized the miracle. Do no evil became do evil only ten times more. Larry Page said he lives by the ‘gospel of ten times more’. Adwords became the greediest algorithm ever deliberately invented.
Every question became intent. Every journey became data. Every pause became measurable. The company that promised to organize the world discovered a more lucrative calling: organizing the world around itself.
Greed, in its mature form, does not snatch. It provides. It smiles. It remembers your password. And when it owns the road, the map, the traffic, and the destination, it politely asks whether you enjoyed the trip.
