I'm not sure it's so unpopular of an opinion; at least, it's shared by me. Your "silly parallels" make great points. In the "app store" analogy, it's not "app

I'm not sure it's so unpopular of an opinion; at least, it's shared by me. Your "silly parallels" make great points. In the "app store" analogy, it's not "apple eating itself", it's developers donating time to create apps who's profits are then used to purchase Apple. So it's a network of volunteer developers eating Apple[0], not "Apple eating itself". In the case of GWEI, it's a network of blogs who are hosting the adsense code that is funding this project. I'd imagine the equivalent is "the developers of whatever is on these sites[1]" are, again, donating their time to purchase shares of Google. After all is done, you can apparently provide your contact information and a portion of the shares collected will be distributed to you[2] but that feature is disabled. Change it up a little bit and instead give the shares to the creators of the sites gaming the system. Now the developers aren't donating their time, they're working in a business and investing all of the profits in the company that's paying them (in delusional hope that they'll somehow be able to purchase all of the shares). That's a whole lot more boring, and adding "delusional/somehow" was likely unnecessary. At the end of the day it's people doing (probably a substantial amount of) work to earn money, it's not a magical "self-powering" system (as Google Will Eat Itself implies). Either way, if the site creators' purpose (or one of their purposes) was to provoke thought as a functional "art piece", it's very cool (sincerely). If it was to make a point of some kind, it's lost on me. If it was to actually own all of Google, this way ... well, good luck with that? [0] I didn't see that coming when I wrote that sentence; no pun intended. [1] Guessing the "network of sites" is landing pages or similar bunk that starts around page 3 of any sufficiently rare search term. Perhaps it's written up on the site and I didn't dig far enough. [2] I'm not terribly clear on how that is supposed to work.