Ken Hillis

"Google and The Political Economy of Metaphysics”

Google’s ultimate vision is to archive the universe, from Google Earth to Google Mars and beyond. Google Book aims to build “a comprehensive index of all the books in the world.” Such plans recall Jorge Luis Borges’ The Library of Babel (1941), in which the universe is conceived as a vast library holding all knowledge. Without the ability to effectively search, in Borges’ account, the library’s contents remain useless. Despair, induced by the absence of an organizational key, propels librarians to imagine two metaphysical technologies—the Crimson Hexagon and the Man of the Book. These technologies—Borges terms them “superstitions”—are magical logs or indices of all the other books. The librarian who finds them will be “analogous to a god.” Google has taken on the role of that god. In adopting “Don’t Be Evil” as their mantra, Google founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page implicitly understand that building the ultimate global index that is accessible from any place with an internet connection usurps not only powers once accorded the divine, but also state powers and those of civil society institutions.  

I critique Google’s project to produce a universal index as crucial to the ways the corporation gains power through inviting searchers everywhere to become, in hegemonic fashion, the authors of their knowledge quests. If information cannot be accessed it may as well not exist, and finding a text through search implicitly positions the searcher as the text’s creator. Because a successful search allows an individual to extract pleasurable use value from the process of exchange that forms the core of search, Google does “share” power with searchers but it retains the lion’s share. Any decentering of power this offers is compensated for when searchers buy into the logic of search and self-fashion themselves in accordance with its principles. In searching others one comes to understand why one should allow oneself to be searched. 

Doubtful critique informs my assessment. Yet critique must go beyond doubt alone, and I also identify emergent forms of identification born of search practices that have the potential to support alternatives to neoliberal models of do-it-yourself self-governance. For example, while search practices do help produce auto-correcting selves, they also render these individuals assearchers. Because of searching’s strong associations with practices such as the pursuit of concealed desires, thorough examination, and ascertaining the presence or absence of some person or thing, internet search, as a mode of identification, has the potential to augment subjects’ interest in initiating action for change in ways similar to Gramsci’s organic intellectual and his or her complex relationship to community organization. The purview of knowledge once held tightly by priests and librarians becomes available to a larger proportion of the population with means of access.