Room 101? Down The Hall And To The Left.

Big Brother, seen here watching you google "Boobtropolis." May tell the wife...hasn't decided.

American’s have developed a strangely bi-polar vision of huge American corporations. Oceans of ink have been spilt on the evils of Wall Street and deranged bond traders. Reams dedicated to the unscrupulous lenders, but nary a word on the honesty of borrowing money you can’t possible pay back. The billions made by Wall Street is proof positive of their nefarious disconnect from the great masses of Main Street.

All right, fair enough. Banks aren’t the only ones Main Street turns on when they start to distrust the giant at the end of the block. A few years ago Microsoft replaced the Soviet Union as the evil empire and were broken up by the Clinton administrations anti-trust league for the fairly innocuous sin of forcing a user to click once to using Microsoft’s web browser and click twice to use a third party’s browser. It was a monopoly, the mob said. But it wasn’t if you used a Mac.

If you think that an extra flick of your forefinger’s interphalangeal joint is a devilish hill to climb to get third party software, buy a Mac. It’s a fine product, but they damn well force you to dance with the one you came with. What gets me through the night with mine is that the skinny chap from the commercials will bring me a soy latte, or whatever it is cool Mac users drink.

America’s paranoia about being dominated by big corporations is not uniform. Google, Inc. has somehow managed to position itself as a $22 billion a year Ben & Jerry’s of the internet despite being a near monopoly, and at the same time acting as some all seeing big brother for everything we write, watch, read and buy online. If you take step back, the very concept of Google’s 65% market share is much scarier that anything the banks, AT&T or Microsoft were up to.

Google is likely to hold more power over us, in the form of what we see and hear and buy, than the bankers who let us buy three times as much house as we should have. They certainly have more control than whoever is minding the 401(k) we emptied out to pay the aforementioned mortgage.

Which is not to say that Google is doing anything nefarious with the information. The worst most of us can say about there service is that it is damned convenient if you have to retrieve fairly obscure information all day.

Despite the convenience, there is a creepy side to Google. I’m currently writing a fairly anti-social history of drinking in America; presumably because I’m good at it. If I start my search for resources by typing “Alcoholism” and “American Indian” and “Hootinanny”, I’ll get a fairly good idea of available resources so I can spend my time at the University library staring at co-eds and not wondering which books to check out. The next day, I’ll notice that the good people who make Bullet Bourbon want to talk to me, as well as the temperate souls at Alcoholics Anonymous, and the Expedia.com crowd thinks I have an overwhelming urge to fly to Montana by the end of the week. These cats are reading our minds. What’s even more obnoxious is that, to judge by my search history, I’m dull as hell.

To make matters even more unsettling, the Obama administration, which prides itself for not handing out jobs to corporate executives who may be corrupt in favor of academics who are certainly incompetent, has gotten very cozy with Google. It’s not the money. According to Opensecret.org, Google employees gave some $803,000 to the Obama political campaign, but that was behind both Microsoft (trying to gain traction with its Bing search engine) and Goldman Sachs who seems to have bought an irrational hate for their money.

Is it because Mr. Obama sees a kindred spirit, having himself been launched in to the Oval Office on a cyber-wave of support? Or is it because Google has a lot of dirt on all of us? An all-seeing eye watching our every cyber move is the sort of thing that would make George Orwell’s Room 101 nightmare seem tame. What could the government do with the information in my Google files? Send a brace of drunken native Americans to terrorize me? Would the party be BYOB?

So why has Google not caused more of a furor? Because Google has done an excellent PR job of making the issue of federal regulation of the internet more important than the information Google collects on us.

Besides, the service really is convenient. When these “big brother” fears surface (or in the case of Google, don’t) I generally wrap myself in the bubble wrap of my own insignificance and carry on about my day.