Why Google is a modern man's God

LARRY Page wants to live forever. Such an ambition should come as no surprise.

This is the man, after all, who, aged just 23, woke up from a dream that he could "download the whole web" and then went on to found Google, a company which celebrates its 20th birthday this week and is seen by many as more of a modern-day god than a corporation.

Jonathan Taplin, author of Move Fast And Break Things, a book which charts the power of the world’s biggest tech giants, including Google, says Page is truly in “pursuit of everlasting life”.

Taplin adds: “Obviously the treatment would be extremely expensive and only available for the very rich. For the whole of history, the less well-off have at least comforted themselves with the thought that death was even handed – even John D Rockefeller was not going to be able to buy off the Grim Reaper.”

Aside from extending the span of human existence, Page’s other dreams are pretty god-like too: one of his goals is to develop a miniature smartphone that hooks directly into your brain, another is to mine asteroids, and a third is to create flying cars – he’s already invested hundreds of millions in the idea.

His biggest dream, however, might give more pause for thought than such sci-fi fantasies, because Page also wants to change the very nature of democracy and government.

Balaji Srinivasan, a powerful venture capitalist following in Page’s slipstream, has spoken gleefully of Silicon Valley – where the giant tech companies are based in California – outstripping Washington when it comes to raw power.

“We want to show what a society run by Silicon Valley would look like,” Srinivasan is quoted as saying in Taplin’s book. “That’s where ‘exit’ comes in … It basically means building an opt-in society, ultimately outside the US, run by technology … Larry Page, for example, wants to set aside a part of the world for unregulated experimentation.”

Some think this vision means Google, and corporations like it, becoming effective nations with their own laws. Page, according to Taplin, “has financed extensive research on privately owned city-states”.

Page, then, is a man who wants to build his own nation … and live forever. What kind of man has these dreams? Well, one unhindered by wealth for a start. He’s one of the richest people on Earth with a net-worth of $56 billion – and his company is so cash-rich it literally can’t spend the money it makes.

He and his wife (Richard Branson was his best man) have a $7 million compound at Palo Alto in the Valley, as well as an eco-mansion.

Page also owns Senses – a 194ft super yacht capable of deep sea exploration, complete with helipad.

But what lies under the wealth? The answer is "a Burner". Burners are devotees of the Burning Man festival in Nevada. The weekender is the very definition of radical chic – libertarian hippiedom that turns its back on the conventions and values of the rest of society.

Page and his fellow Google co-founder Sergey Brin both identify as avid Burners. The first-ever Google Doodle – the animation on Google’s homepage celebrating special events – was created as an "out of office" to let the world know the two were off to Burning Man.

But these two Burners, it’s been said, need a lot of “adult supervision”. Court documents relating to a lawsuit over the pair’s Boeing 767 corporate jet – fitted with hammocks and a cocktail bar and known as "the party plane" – reveal that the pair lost it with each other over what type of bed should go in it. Google CEO Eric Schmidt – appointed by Page and Brin because he too is a Burner – had to step in.

“Sergey, you can have whatever bed you want in your room; Larry, you can have whatever kind of bed you want in your bedroom. Let’s move on,” Schmidt told the pair. Page, Brin and Schmidt have eight private jets between them, incidentally.

Bow down and worship

GOOGLE has already changed the world – and your life with it. Professor Scott Galloway of New York University’s business school, a serial tech entrepreneur and author of The Four: The Hidden DNA Of Amazon, Apple, Facebook And Google, says: “Google is modern man’s god … About one in six queries posed to the search engine have never been asked before. What rabbi, priest, scholar or coach has so much gravitas?”

The prayers of the world are being uttered up to Google – then scraped for data and sold on to ad agencies, making the company not just one of the most powerful and richest corporations ever seen on Earth, but an organisation which knows you probably better than you know yourself.

It certainly knows you better than your partner, or parents, or children – would you tell them the things you tell Google? Would you let them see all your searches? Your fears and secrets, your darkest and most vulnerable thoughts?

In fact, some speculate Google might soon be able to guess your thoughts before you think them. Galloway calls this "precog" – for precognition. “This will come,” he says, “when a thin layer of AI [artificial intelligence] on top of search queries and a few other data streams, including our movements, are used effectively to predict crime, disease and stock prices.”

Think of what Google knows about you – it knows your location, your search history, your email, your interests, your friends and family. “The temptation to create predictive links between intention and action will be irresistible to governments, hackers and rogue employers,” says Galloway.

The creepy line

NATIONAL Security Agency whistleblower Edward Snowden horrified the world when he revealed the NSA was spying on citizens. It later turned out Google, Apple and Facebook had given spooks access to their worldwide networks. Cue outrage.

The anger is ironic, though, for as Taplin points out: “The average citizen has voluntarily (though unknowingly) turned over to Google and Facebook far more personal information than the government will ever have.”

Google’s “primary business”, Taplin says, is “surveillance marketing – selling our personal information to advertisers for billions of dollars”.

The company's Schmidt once said that it was company policy to “get right up to the creepy line and not cross it”.

In 2014, a study by psychologists at the American Institute for Behavioural Research looked at how Google search rankings for political candidates influence voters. The researchers estimated that “Google could determine the outcome of upwards of 25 per cent of all national elections”.

Schmidt once commented: “We don’t need you to type at all. We know where you are are. We know where you’ve been. We can more or less know what you’re thinking about.”

What was it he was saying about crossing the "creepy line"?

The new robber barons

PEOPLE think of Google as a search engine company – it’s not, it’s a media company. It makes its money selling ads and crushing the opposition.

Apart from state-run broadcasters like the BBC, nearly all other forms of media on the planet depend on ad revenue. Newspapers need ads to hire journalists and print papers, TV stations need ads to make shows and hire staff.

Google took the output of these "old media" companies and plundered it – which is why many critics call the Big Tech giants “the new robber barons”.

Who makes more money from a newspaper story online – the newspaper or Google? The answer is Google. Prof Scott Galloway, who was on the board of the New York Times, says that Google and Facebook do a “better job extracting value from Times journalists than the management of the Times”.

Google destroys old media, says Galloway. “Google not only was crawling content for free, it was also slicing and dicing that content for its users. When people were looking for a hotel in Paris, for example, Google would link to a New York Times travel article on Paris.

“But at the top of the page it would place Google’s own ad for the Four Seasons Hotel … Google was also learning – better than the Times itself – exactly what the paper’s readers wanted and were likely to want in the future.

And that meant Google could target those Times readers with far greater precision and make more money from each ad. As much as 10 times more. That meant we were exchanging dollars for dimes.”

The parable of the New York Times and Google is replicated across the media. Google cannibalises the old media and monetises it – leaving empty newsrooms and creaking TV stations behind it. This is all before we come to what Google does to art and culture.

Think of YouTube, owned by Google, and all those free movies and documentaries and songs up there – do you think many of the actors or singers or directors get a penny from that? Without culture being paid for there will be no culture.

Giant Monopoly

ITS power has made Google an effective "public utility", Galloway says – like the water system or the road network or the electrical grid. It’s also a monopoly, but only Europe has taken this seriously, accusing the company of unfair advantage – perhaps, understandably, given that Google has a 90 per cent share of all EU searches.

Globally, Google has a 92 per cent share of the market, worth $92.4bn. Internet searching on Google is now a bigger business than paper and forestry ($8bn), construction and engineering ($79bn), real estate ($76bn) and gas ($58bn).

“How would we feel if one company controlled 92 per cent of the global construction and engineering trade?” Galloway asks. “Would we worry that their power and influence had breached the reasonable threshold or would we just think they were awesome innovators as we do with Google?”

YouTube, owned by Google, uploads 400 hours of video every minute, giving it more video content than any other company on Earth. “It also controls the operating system on two billion Android devices,” says Galloway.

When the EU finally caught up with Google and fined it $2.7bn for anti-competitive practices, the penalty amounted to just “three per cent of its cash on hand”, says Galloway. Part of Google’s power lies in the fact that it is a “Benjamin Button” company – the more you drive your car, the less valuable it becomes, but with Google, the more people use it the more valuable it becomes, because the more data it has gathered to be sold.

That power breeds power. With Google and Facebook controlling 51 per cent of the global mobile ad spend, few can dare to not do business with them – even though trust in the companies has been shattered by tax avoidance and the spreading of fake news.

“Advertisers have just two platforms to market their products online,” says Galloway. Advertisers need Google and Facebook more than the tech giants need them. Galloway says if Ford decided it was so concerned about fake news that it pulled advertising the company “would be commended for their actions in the media, and the market would promptly cut 10 per cent off their share price”.

Google versus you

BIG Tech is also ganging up on consumers. Galloway says we should think of Google as like the shop window of a huge department store on Christmas Eve – only it’s the size of Everest.

“Anyone can purchase a place in that window and land at the top of Google search,” he says. “When someone types ‘Star Wars action figures’, the retailer that has bid the most is going to top the paid listings. Amazon regularly buys that number one spot, because it has the money to do so.”

The game is being played “by a different set of rules and with a different deck of cards”. Not only does Google destroy jobs, crush culture, and avoid taxes – but they’ve been weaponised by some of the most dangerous people on Earth. Russian military intelligence has used the big media platforms online to disrupt Western democracies.

Google’s AdSense system – which pays per click – “provided much of the revenue to Eastern European teams that were flooding the web with fake news”, says Taplin. In November 2017, the Senate Intelligence Committee chairman Richard Burr begged Google, Facebook and Twitter, saying: “Don’t let nation-states disrupt our future. You’re the frontline of defence for it.”

Tech-watchers like Galloway have nothing but scorn for such special pleading. “They should be our frontline against our enemies? Yeah, f*** that.”

Fightback

THERE is a bubbling current of anger now growing against Google. So is it time to do what has been done to monopolies in the past and break up Google?

“The last 10 years,” says Taplin, “have seen the wholesale destruction of the creative economy – journalists, musicians, authors and film-makers – wrought by three tech monopolies, Google, Facebook and Amazon. Their dominance in Artificial Intelligence will extend this ‘creative destruction’ to much of the service industry, including transportation, medicine and retail.”

As a final warning, he adds: “When the flood of unemployment brought about by the AI revolution is upon us, we will not be ready.”

Recommended reading: Scott Galloway's The Four: The hidden DNA of Amazon, Apple, Facebook and Google; and Jonathan Taplin's Move Fast and Break Things: How Facebook, Google and Amazon have cornered culture and undermined democracy