*Lotta authors eloquently moaning about Google this season. Don't wanna do that myself, just don't have the time for it, but here is British author Nick Harkaway engaging in an actual critique of some no-kidding existent capitalism, ie Google. Thesis: Google's not an evil capitalist ultramastermind because Google is so obviously making it up as they go along.
*Without even bothering to imagine an endgame that somehow resolves into anything that can be melted down in analysis.
*In other words, Google is carrying on with literature pretty much exactly as the finance industry did with real estate. Cook up an algorithm, bundle some stuff, see if there's any profit there, move right on in. Contingent, market-driven, emergent, opportunity-centric. Been at it for years now. Tremendous prosperity beckons from this practice, but, you know, of course they're not planning it. If they were planning it, they wouldn't have that famous Google policy of giving employees oodles of free R&D time to just mess with interesting stuff. Google is a network culture and Google oozes amoeba-like in all directions.
*Google doesn't have Marxist Five Year Plans. There's no Hegelian historical determinism there in Mountain View. They don't even have a God That Failed, because they're agnostics. See how much easier things get to analyze when you stop forcing them into that framework?
*So yes, Google's book deal is not an "improvement." It was never intended to become an "improvement." You can't deal with "improvement" unless you have some coherent idea of where you stand and where you are going, and some kind of metric to judge the motion. There ain't any. There's no there there. One can't even call it an "intent." More of an osmotic pressure.
*One can then ask, well, what if these improvised tactics prove dangerous and the whole jerry-built scheme just blows up and falls over? Well, it already did. "Too big to fail." That's what happens. That's the answer when you ask that question. "Broken bits festering where they lie." Blue Screen o' Gothic High-Tech death. The damage, the broken balloon. It's all around. Not theoretically. Now. That's the Critique of Existent Capitalism. It's also the critique of existent anti-capitalism, because, in a network society, you look stuff up on Google in order to criticize Google.
*So: if there's tremendous damage to, say, music, cinema or literature, because that's an unsought side-effect of ever-expanding network aggregation, that's mighty bad, but that's not a "plan." Nobody planned to destroy Detroit or empty the bubble suburbs around Las Vegas, either.
*Global warming isn't a "plan." Global warming denial guys don't even confront global warming. They dismiss the physical facts as unthinkable fraud, because the real thing they fear and oppose is a *plan,* or anything that even looks like focussed human intent and willed purpose when it comes to our basic survival. They figure that as a stalking horse for a leftist totalitarian control of the economy – and yeah, of course that's an implication.
*You're gonna critique Google? Great. Do you have a plan to implement that critique? Of course you don't. How do you plan to regulate Google? Authors think that book deals, rights plans and signing contracts for royalties will help. 'Cause, you know, that's all authors know how to see or use. If you've lost the keys to your wealth, you need to look under the streetlights.
*"Destructive destruction." Small pieces loosely joined, folks. It's like being driven to famine by a locust horde, and haughtily demanding to negotiate with the King Locust.
http://www.nickharkaway.com/2010/02/google-more-questions-than-answers/
(...)
I think a lot of people are assuming merrily that Google has A Plan. This is very comforting for publishers and agents and writers alike. The digital world is looming and digital piracy (or filesharing or booklending, call it what you like) is already begun.
It’s a scary new world, and ho ho! Here’s the most friendly face in it – or one of them – offering to sort it all out. Yay!
Except the thing is Google doesn’t seem to have a plan. Google has a belief in Creative Destruction and a sense that if they put stuff out into the world first and find ways to monetise it later, that will work. It has done before.
Never mind that inductive reasoning is not dependable (ask a turkey) or that it may, if it works, work because of Google’s stunningly privileged position as the index of the web rather than because it’s a good way of dealing with stuff.
It’s only ‘creative’ if what is produced is better and more powerful and brighter than what was there before, and there’s actually no particular reason to believe that to be the case.
This may just be destructive destruction of an industry which is heavily bound up in the culture of our nations and whose existence props up the production of long-form fiction and all sorts of other stuff, in favour of, er, Google and companies like it which are essentially aggregators and searchers rather than content creators.
Google has said repeatedly that they are not entering publishing, and we tend to take that with a pinch of salt. Guess what? I think it’s absolutely true. They’re not. If they end up being in the position where they have to take over some of the roles of publishers, that will be a side effect rather than an ambition, and they may not do it very well.
Indeed, they may choose not to do it at all, leaving the broken bits of our industry to fester where they lie.
Or they may become a great publisher. The point is, I don’t think they know.
