Google as a bitter flask of God’s judgement

Ah Google, sweet Google! There is but no fairer search than thee.

Bob said the times are a-changin’. Postmodernity, “truth motivated by love” and “compassionate conservatism” can all move over. What is the new analytical framework?

Google is. The medium is Google. The message is Google. Google is the paradigm.

Behold its power. Behold its contradictions. Behold Google as a model for our world.

Google is fast, easy, and dirty. It’s informationserveduphotquickerthanyoucanthink. Google is reloading if a screen takes more than a few seconds to load. Google is hanging up after a few rings of the phone. Google is you have four seconds to make the right impression at the interview. Google is the order at 11:55 filled by 12.

Google is the great how to. How to solve a quadratic equation, or how to just cheat on the math exam. How to make a mojito, or how to treat for alcohol poisoning. How to find your high school sweetheart halfway across the world, and how to have a secret affair with that person behind your spouse’s back.

Google sees everything. It finds the silver lining, the wheat among the chaff. The lost sheep, the needle in the haystack. The to-be law student who admits in his application that he just wants to take advantage of people and take their money. The EMU student who decides to make a living by not giving back to the world, and by selling tobacco, guns or drugs instead, trading societal insecurity for personal financial security. Google finds it all.

Google is connectivity. Google is high school buddies and long lost lovers finding each other again. Google is online support groups of soccer moms. Google is finding genuine humanity out there, and renewing your faith in the common person.

Google is the commodification of all things and all people. Google is online dating and phone sex. Google is “skill inventories.” Google is minimum billable hours. Google is a street of neighbors who don’t know each other’s last names. It is substituting electrons where people once stood. Google is the notion that you can measure the worth of people by what they do, say or think.

Google is the ever-present helpbar. It is 24-hour "thank you for calling AT&T; your call is important to us" customer service of this era. It is the C.A. on-duty. It is the pizza man at three in the morning. Google in Berlin at 7 a.m. is Miami at 1 p.m. is Suva at 5 p.m. Google is the foreign currency market which is always open where the sun shines. Google is the all-nighter.

Google is the quick escape. Google is the solution to the struggle between the party on Thursday and a paper due at 9 a.m. Friday. Google provides the required material for an ultra-thoughtful, ultra-plagiarized Faith and Praxis essay culled from the brilliant insights of other suitably thoughtful writers.

Google is the bitter flask of the Lord’s judgment. Faculty become suspicious when those paragraphs sound a bit too thoughtfully written. F’s are dispensed with smug righteousness after minimal effort to verify the injustice. "Vengeance is mine," sayeth Google, and quotes Prov. 11:18 for good measure.

Google is the hegemony of the Western world. Everyone runs Google; the Microsoft Windows of the search engine world. Google is what everyone wants. It is Chinese children shouting “Michael Jordan” in a village in Sichuan province. Google is the urge to purchase the millionth album by some manufactured artist in a record store in New York, N.Y. Google is Britney Spears taking off her clothes and politicians starting wars. Not because they really want to, but because it’s what everyone wants.

Yet Google is an alternative. The masses run Windows, but Google does not. Google runs Unix. It rejects the hegemony of our Ameri-centrism and presents a viable alternative. Google is not subject to peer review. Google gives a forum for the minority points of views that are left out of the public forum, be they terrorists or teachers. Google is not elected, nor does it have a constituency. Google does not pander to what is popular or profitable.

Google is off the beaten track. Google is alternative service during World War II. Google is the people who live below the federal taxable income. Google is Amos when everyone listens to Rush Limbaugh. Google is Katie and Jessica for a world listening to the Backstreet Boys.

Google is the oasis of Democracy in the desert of corrupt military dictatorships. Google searches the web and - California recall style - decides who is the most popular and relevant for our society’s collective want. Google is politics as it should be for the world. Google is the history of our country, with liberty and justice for all.

But Google is democracy - the demos of the kratia. Google is where one person is one vote, and your power or money doesn’t matter. It is elected leaders staying in office until voted out by the people of its country - not by the guns of an insurgent movement backed by faceless business interests. Google is keep your hands to yourself. Google is not exploding cigars. Google is not the C.I.A. Google is not the morally problematic nature of aggressive, military-based foreign policy in one area of the world, and back-burner, diplomacy-based policy in another.

Google is the portal to the world, and as such, is boring on the surface but the most overwhelming page of them all. Google is the generic little American boy who likes baseball, tells fart jokes and thinks girls have cooties. The same kid who graduated from college when he was twelve, codes in Java, Perl and C++, already aced the SAT and speaks fluent Latin, Italian, and Chinese.

That’s us and our world. Google is when you have round-trip tickets to anywhere in the world, and you go to the beaches of New Jersey. Google is Cartman, the fat kid who sits around all day watching T.V. and eating cheesy-poofs. We are Cartman. I am Cartman.

Google is Web. Google is Images, Groups, Answers and Directory. Google is News.

But is Google meaning? No. Google is content. Google can tell you what’s there, but not if it’s important. It provides 50 million answers to the question that we don’t know how to ask.

Google is not power. Nor is it intelligence, nor critical thinking. Google is potentiality, and only that. Our society’s access to information is enough to make the librarians of ancient Alexandria swoon, and yet we spend more time watching T.V.

Google is all the content you want, yet Google is a Nietzschean world stripped of its meaning at the numbing pace of Google miles per hour.

Nietzsche, on a sidenote, announced the death of God way back around the closing of some century. But is God really dead? Google only finds a mere half million documents referring to Nietzsche. On the other hand, Google finds God 17 million times in the cyberether.

According to Google, God is greater than Nietzsche.

Google has spoken. God wins.