‘Don’t be evil.’ Google’s unofficial motto.
‘Evil men don’t get up in the morning saying, “I’m going to do evil.” They say, “I’m going to make the world a better place.”’ Christopher Booker.
Meanwhile — while you were distracted by other things like tax bills and school fees and somehow scraping by — Google and Amazon and Apple took over the world. This, of course, is what novels by the likes of William Gibson, films such as Blade Runner and comic strips like Judge Dredd have been telling us for some time: that one day, the world will be ruled not by governments but by giant corporations. What I don’t think many of us realised — I certainly didn’t — was that such a thing was going to happen in our lifetime.
But then I watched Ben Lewis’s glacial but rewarding Storyville documentary Google and the World Brain (BBC4, Monday) and my eyes were opened.
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