In a world where the boundaries of outlandishness are pushed increasingly further and further away, have you heard the one about how everybody’s favourite cookie monster aka Google, wants to solve death? If this doesn’t take the cake yet, then maybe Google planning the early stages of a city state, might.
Sometime, after setting up a company that hopes to cure death, Google had acquired Boston Dynamics, a company that makes Big Dog and PETMAN robots for the military, according to science and entertainment website io9.com.
The website wrote, “If you think of Google’s Mountain View campus as a city state, and all its satellite campuses as colonies, then it was kind of inevitable that the company would raise an army. Already, it has a culture within its walls that is as strong as any city-state’s.
“Googlers across the globe share common values, types of work and meals. They exist within a social hierarchy as clear-cut as any caste system in ancient Greece (though Google doesn’t have slaves, which is nice). And they’ve even taken on a state-like role in defending U.S. assets against Chinese hackers.”
With Google’s latest actions, io9.com brings up a good point: Google is acting less like a company whose goals are entirely economic, and more like a city-state, whose goals include ineffable things like quality of life.
In other words, Google isn’t so dissimilar from companies in Neal Stephenson and Marge Piercy novels, whereby corporations become cultures, conduct social experiments, and propagate belief systems.
Google is already in almost every corner of our digital lives, with online services like Gmail, GTalk, Google Docs, Google Maps and most foreboding of all, the Google search engine, which ‘determines’ what information gets fed to us, every time we look something up online.
Should one company have this much influence on our online activities and inevitably our lives?
IT BYTES BACK! says: This article articulates most of what we have begun to feel about the dominance of Google in our online activities from email, blogs, calendar, geographic destinations, work, photos, videos, postings, etc
Are we becoming citizens of the Google Empire?
