Like every self-respecting Hollywood player, Ben Silverman Googles himself. Competitively. "It's become this ridiculous new power game." It's more like the new kabbalah. Google is many things to many people, and to some, perhaps too much. Google is changing culture and consciousness. Esther Dyson says that the flood of unedited information demands that users sharpen critical thinking skills, to filter the results. "Google forces us to ask, 'What do we really want to know?'" Larry Lessig: "Google makes it harder than ever to escape the past." Google's new headquarters is what graduate school would be like if all the students were rich. I like (and use) Google as much as the next guy, but I remain truly disturbed by the lack of real competition. It is not a good thing to have most of the world researching from (and even ranking themselves against) _one_ collection of facts. |