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My opinion is that google only ever presented as a new type of company - without ever being that. It was marketing spin - and I bought into that. I since foun

My opinion is that google only ever presented as a new type of company - without ever being that. It was marketing spin - and I bought into that. I since found out it was funded from inception by inqtel, the CIA's venture capital arm. There are lots of articles to this effect, eg: https://medium.com/insurge-intelligence/how-the-cia-made-google-e836451a959e https://medium.com/insurge-intelligence/how-the-cia-made-goo... So, the hype, the free canteen, etc was all just spin to move people from a more messy handmade internet, into a corporate one. A way to dominate and intercept everyone's actions online when searching. And you have to say, it was a good strategy! Do the younger generation even know that there are pages outside of the corporate held companies?

robertlagrant 3y ago
I don't think that's true at all. The reason it could be like that was because it was making a ton of money. It's easy to buy whatever utopia you care to imagine when you have unlimited money. I also don't think you can say, in any sense I can imagine, that Google made the internet more "corporate". I agree that SEO is painful, but Google was still based around the open internet, and modifying it only slightly to allow websites to add in advertisements. It's the Facebooks and OpenAIs of the world, creating walled gardens and curated datasets, that are corporatising things.
- closewith 3y ago
  I think you’re underselling Search and Analytics as surveillance tools. Google added telemetry to the web.
  - robertlagrant 3y ago
    Er, yes that's fair I suppose. I wouldn't call it surveillance, as that has a worse connotation than I think what Google did deserves, but certainly statistical tracking of populations across websites. I'm still not sure I'd call it corporatisation though, as they were working within the confines of the web, and the monetisation ability of that large-scale but precise user interests tracking meant ads could pay more to enable individual websites to thrive.
    - Apocryphon 3y ago
      SEO eventually led to the proliferation of link farms, machine-generated blogspam, and recipe sites that read like essays with FAQs. So it did cause perverse standardization of web content to some extent. But agreed that it didn’t close the web into isolated portals like Facebook, which was in opposition to indexing and the business they were building. I would say Google has been bad at handling results from semi-open spammy walled gardens though, like Pinterest, Quora, and Reddit. Maybe even Stack Overflow.
- Planktonne 3y ago
  > It's easy to buy whatever utopia you care to imagine when you have unlimited money. It's easy to think you've bought a utopia; money buys a lot of blindspots.
vintermann 3y ago
> I since found out it was funded from inception by inqtel, the CIA's venture capital arm. It just occurred to me - it's almost a too stupid theory to be true, but you should never underestimate this kind of corporate stupidity - the name change to Alphabet, maybe that was part of telling the actual alphabet agencies, "We're on your side"? One thing is sure, Schmidt really, really wanted to have a good relationship with Obama's state department.
- hello_computer 3y ago
  Assange's encounter with the big G, as documented in his "When Google Met Wikileaks," leaves little to the imagination on how tightly Google has been integrated with the US Department of State.
gumballindie 3y ago
> My opinion is that google only ever presented as a new type of company - without ever being that. It was and is a factory. Like chrysler and ford before them, and the mines before them.
deleted 3y ago
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robertlagrant 3y ago

I don't think that's true at all. The reason it could be like that was because it was making a ton of money. It's easy to buy whatever utopia you care to imagine when you have unlimited money. I also don't think you can say, in any sense I can imagine, that Google made the internet more "corporate". I agree that SEO is painful, but Google was still based around the open internet, and modifying it only slightly to allow websites to add in advertisements. It's the Facebooks and OpenAIs of the world, creating walled gardens and curated datasets, that are corporatising things.

closewith 3y ago
I think you’re underselling Search and Analytics as surveillance tools. Google added telemetry to the web.
- robertlagrant 3y ago
  Er, yes that's fair I suppose. I wouldn't call it surveillance, as that has a worse connotation than I think what Google did deserves, but certainly statistical tracking of populations across websites. I'm still not sure I'd call it corporatisation though, as they were working within the confines of the web, and the monetisation ability of that large-scale but precise user interests tracking meant ads could pay more to enable individual websites to thrive.
  - Apocryphon 3y ago
    SEO eventually led to the proliferation of link farms, machine-generated blogspam, and recipe sites that read like essays with FAQs. So it did cause perverse standardization of web content to some extent. But agreed that it didn’t close the web into isolated portals like Facebook, which was in opposition to indexing and the business they were building. I would say Google has been bad at handling results from semi-open spammy walled gardens though, like Pinterest, Quora, and Reddit. Maybe even Stack Overflow.
Planktonne 3y ago
> It's easy to buy whatever utopia you care to imagine when you have unlimited money. It's easy to think you've bought a utopia; money buys a lot of blindspots.

vintermann 3y ago

> I since found out it was funded from inception by inqtel, the CIA's venture capital arm. It just occurred to me - it's almost a too stupid theory to be true, but you should never underestimate this kind of corporate stupidity - the name change to Alphabet, maybe that was part of telling the actual alphabet agencies, "We're on your side"? One thing is sure, Schmidt really, really wanted to have a good relationship with Obama's state department.

hello_computer 3y ago
Assange's encounter with the big G, as documented in his "When Google Met Wikileaks," leaves little to the imagination on how tightly Google has been integrated with the US Department of State.

gumballindie 3y ago

> My opinion is that google only ever presented as a new type of company - without ever being that. It was and is a factory. Like chrysler and ford before them, and the mines before them.

deleted 3y ago

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