I finally remembered what got my Evil Google dander up in the first place. Though I know why I put it out of mind, until I did post on the subject, in my usual roundabout manner. The unconscious slowly working its way from snark-rage (nothing personal, Seth) back to sorrow. The deep, genuine sorrow of loss. Loss being a hard and bitter truth about life. Life is, in our lived experience, not a series of gains but of losses. That river. It flows only one way.
Alright, depending on your point of view, but get that relativity out of your head, I am making a point here.
Or rather, I am citing a painful point made by Anil Dash, which sank my heart. It’s not only the truth that gets us down, it’s the frigging hopelessness … and when you are up against Google or Blogger, if that doesn’t bring on the most primitive trauma extant. The helplessness and dependency of infancy that anybody in their right mind sets out to forget.
I was lucky. Out of a million-billion bloggers, the guy I asked for help and who for years pretty much ran this blog, was someone Blogger came to. (Pete will know who I mean.) Far as I can tell, he is a Java genius … or Javascript … or just a genius. Another time I will write about the fact that he does not consider himself to be Influential or a Thought Leader or any other such horse-shit. None of the genuinely smart people do.
Alright. Biting bullet. What Anil said:
Connecting PageRank to economic systems such as AdWords and AdSense corrupted the meaning and value of links, by turning them into an economic exchange.
Let that sink in. It gets worse.
… hyperlinking on the web was a social, aesthetic, and expressive editorial action.
… when Google introduced its advertising systems at the same time as it began to dominate the economy around search on the web, it transformed a basic form of online communication, without the permission of the web’s users, and without explaining that choice or offering an option to those users. [emphases mine]
Worse, the transformation was retroactive … and the economic value could not be decoupled from the informational value. Inevitably, spammers arose to take advantage of the ability to create high-economic-value links at very low cost, causing vast damage to the ability to use links as a purely informational exchange.
This next is the part where, for me, regret piled on top of sorrow. I waited a long time to be able to write to the web … and now that period when I could, sans all this god damn PR crapping up the place, seems awful god damn brief.
… awareness of this transformation in the fundamental value of links, from informational to economic, could have led Google to develop a system that separated editorial and aesthetic choices from economic ones, preventing the eventual link-spam arms race.
Just shoot me. I mean it this time.
