Don’t be evil.
I’m sure that on more than one occasion over the past decade, Larry Page and Sergey Brin have wished they’d never committed their company to such a nebulous goal. After all, who gets to decide what’s “evil”? Sure, Google has an extensive corporate conduct policy which aims to do just that. But the real problem is, you’ve just invited everyone to start looking for ways in which you might be, in their eyes, “evil.”
Page and Brin probably never imagined that Harper’s Magazine — once influential on policy and culture but now self-marginalized on the far left — would one day deem them evil for leaving their computers on all night. But maybe they should have, because a new feature in the magazine’s latest edition does pretty much that.
The tech blogosphere paid this article some attention over the holiday weekend, but none of those tracked by Techmeme bothered to scrutinize the article. But Ian Spencer, a friend and fellow former editor of the Oregon Commentator, has.
What follows is a letter he sent to Harper’s. As we figure it will never grace the pages of Harper’s letters page — let alone Google’s search results — he has allowed me to print here:
In light of Ginger Strand’s “Keyword: Evil” article in March 2008 I find it interesting that harpers.org contains code directing a user’s web browser to communicate with Google’s servers every time they visit a page on your site. This service is called Google Analytics, and it enables Harper’s management to easily view site traffic patterns. The supposed costs of “the cloud” must carry less weight than the benefits of website visitor statistics, at least for Harper’s. And if Ms. Strand and Harper’s would like to reduce Google’s electricity usage, they could always tell Google (and other search spiders) to not index their web pages.
There were also a few inaccurate and deceptive statements in the piece. For example, Google’s servers use standard techniques like caching and indexing to reduce the overhead of a single query to just a few megabytes worth of data, not “petabytes” as claimed by Ms. Strand. And the ominous-sounding “tens of billions of CPU cycles” used to process said data is by no means excessive. After all, a computer processor faster than one gigahertz goes through more than ten billion cycles every ten seconds. If you’ve read “Keyword: Evil” on harpers.org you’ve probably used more electricity than Google’s server does when you search for “journalistic integrity.”
But I expect inaccuracies when reading about computers in a non-technical magazine. Far more troubling is the notion that Google is evil simply because they use a lot of electricity. There are plenty of important issues to criticize them on: they have horrible privacy policies and censor users in China, for example. But attacking them for providing an energy-consuming service which Harper’s itself uses was, well, unexpected.
I would just like to add: “Keyword: Evil”? Really? No wonder Harper’s is so antagonistic toward today’s Internet — they’re still on AOL dial-up.
Pretty funny stuff.