Googlewashing

From: rhinoceros (rhinoceros@freemail.gr)
Date: Fri 04 Apr 2003 - 12:59:53 GMT

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    [rhinoceros] Here is an interesting concept. Googlewashing.

    http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/6/30087.html

    <snip>

    Then came this
    (http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/people/jmoore/secondsuperpower.html). Entitled The Second Superpower Rears its Beautiful Head, by James F Moore, it was accompanied by a brand new blog.

    The details need not detain us for very long, because the consequences of this piece are much more important than its anodyne contents.

    It's a plea for net users to organize themselves as a "superpower", and represents a class of techno-utopian literature that John Perry Barlow has been promoting - the same sappy stuff, but not as well written - for the past ten years.

    <snip>

    Now here's the important bit. Look what the phrase "Second Superpower" produces on Google now. Try it!. Moore's essay is right there at the top. And not just first, but it already occupies all but three of the first thirty spots.

    The bashful Moore writes: "It was nice of Dave Winer [weblog tools vendor] and Doc Searls [advertising consultant] to pick up on it, even if it's not really ready for much exposure." No matter, Moore is an overnight A-list blogging superstar, at his very first attempt.

    Although it took millions of people around the world to compel the Gray Lady to describe the anti-war movement as a "Second Superpower", it took only a handful of webloggers to spin the alternative meaning to manufacture sufficient PageRankT to flood Google with Moore's alternative, neutered definition.

    Indeed, if you were wearing your Google-goggles, and the search engine was your primary view of the world, you would have a hard time believing that the phrase "Second Superpower" ever meant anything else.

    To all intents and purposes, the original meaning has been erased. Obliterated, in just seven weeks.

    <snip>

    All a strange coincidence, no doubt, but the picture darkens when you look at a parallel conversation taking place elsewhere, whose hyperlinks contributed to the redefinition, and help explain how this semantic ethnic-cleansing took place so quickly.

    Moore's subversion of the meaning of "Secondary Superpower" - his high PageRankT from derives from followers of 'A-list' tech bloggers linking from an eerily similar "Emergent Democracy" discussion list, which in turn takes its name from a similarly essay posted by Joi Ito [Lunch - Lunch - Lunch - Segway - Lunch - Lunch - Fawning Parody] who is a colossus of authority in these circles, hence lots of PageRankT-boosting hyperlinks, and who like Moore, appeared from nowhere as a figure of authority.

    Lunchin' Ito's essay is uncannily similar to Moore's - both are vague and elusive and fail to describe how the "emergent" democracy might form a legal framework, a currency, a definition of property or - most important this, when you're being hit with a stick by a bastard - an armed resistance (which in polite circles today, we call a "military").

    As with Moore, academic and historical research in this field is vapored away, as if by magic.

    <snip>

    But the real marvel is that they did it with so few people. Pew Research Center's latest research says the number of Internet users who look at blogs is " so small that it is not possible to draw statistically meaningful conclusions about who uses blogs." They peg it at about four per cent. But we're looking at a small sub-genre of blogdom, the tech blogs, and specifically, we're looking at an 'A list' of that sub- sub-genre.

    <snip>

    Googlewash

    Writing about Google's collusion with the People's Republic of China to block access to mainland users, censorship researcher Seth Finkelsetein observed:

    "Contrary to earlier utopian theories of the Internet, it takes very little effort for governments to cause certain information simply to vanish for a huge number of people."

    Rub out the word 'government', and replace it with 'weblog A-list'. In this case a commons resource, this very potent and quite viral phrase, was created by millions of people. But it was poisoned by a very select number of 'bloggers'. Possibly a dozen, but no more than 30, we'd guess.

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