Google, You Own Me

2019 Update:   5 years later and  “more true” than when originally written if that can be correctly said. Add Facebook, add Apple watch, AR/VR , gene edited  babies and we see we are owned not just by Google but by data we produce. Should we be profiting?

(Original, 2014)

Alvin Toffler said, “Acceleration is one of the most important and least understood of all social forces.” There is much to be understood of futurism within the scope of enormous change.

Let’s talk about it right now in terms of Google.

If you cocoon yourself from massive tech change going on, enjoy. If you embrace it, enjoy. If you scream out in existential angst, “Help. Help. Help. Save me.” read on. It’s  tongue in cheek, very real look at you as a commodity for sale in the data cosmos market.

Too late to save you from change.  Gone to the googleplex..all of me, they took all of me. I am my data. I sold my soul to the company store. I got gmail in return. Where’s Eudora? (only the Few and Far Between will know Eudora. Google Eudora, the rest of you.)

WE ARE THE PRODUCT

Wired.com analyzes the purchase of Nest:

While shoring up its hardware business is likely a key motivation for its acquisition of Nest, Google still makes nearly all its money based on an oft-repeated maxim (though not by Google): You are the product.

Google has my everything. Now, with NEST, no place is safe. So, we here at The Silicon Valley Story are going to let you know – your world is not yours.  Your consciousness is about to be downloaded at Calico (Google’s secret anti-aging program at their Project X. ). You can access it for your continuing life with a new body. Your world has been interconnected into The Internet of Things . You may have an IP adress just like the things.

It goes this way: put sensors everywhere and on everything, That is the Internet of Things or IoT.

This is the land of wearable tech like Google glass or most of what you found at CES, 2014. Baby jammies that report heart rate and temp to parents on coffee mugs. (Don’t ask, just go look it up. Intel did this one.)

This is bigger though than being owned by Google. We are at the point when we feel the pace quickening to such a degree that we wake up feeling tense and behind already. (Ok, we do, here at SV Story).

Let’s understand the machines, the dreams, the possibilities, the meaning of we the people as product, data, data points, a collective organism, and maybe the death of all we knew. The faster tech grows, the faster tech changes our lives.

Yes, Google owns me, but I know it. And that is the space in which I breathe. I can no more change cultural and tech innovation/evolution than I can change having arrived and changed from a journey of many millions of years and grandma was a single cell organism living in the swamp. Or maybe she was smart dust from another cosmos.

Maybe being owned by Google has its perks. Just like the 24/7 perks at the Googleplex.

Shall we look at it that way?