The Big Computer

Posted on January 17, 2008
Filed Under What's New |

I was reading Nick Carr being interviewed in this month’s WIRED magazine complaining about the way so much information is coming within the orbit of a very small number of companies - Google, Yahoo, Microsoft and Facebook.

I’ve become a big user of Google’s centralised services - I use Google docs and Gmail of course and I feel safe doing so. I mean I feel just as safe as I do having those documents on my hard drive where I can be hacked.

So what’s the big deal? My guess is Carr, being American, has a better handle on the risks associated with leaving data and computing power in the hands of US corporations. By way of contrast I’m a bit naive. None of my data is that sensitive - a few hundred articles that are already in the public domain. Some pitch documents that failed to get commissioned, some TV ideas, a failed book too.

What I wonder do people like Nick Carr know that I don’t? The theme is taken up here in a Guardian article :”….59 million suckers, all of whom have volunteered their ID card information and consumer preferences to an American business they know nothing about.”

Well I don’t have an ID card and the only information I’ve volunteered is my e-mail address and a few lines about my garden along with a number of unrevealing photographs of artefacts in the British Museum.

The Guardian article goes onto criticise the financial brains behind Facebook who are linked to neoconservative politics: “TheVanguard.Org is an online community of Americans who believe in conservative values, the free market and limited government as the best means to bring hope and ever-increasing opportunity to everyone, especially the poorest among us.”

Actually I find that statement to be not so extreme and even the Guardian has bought into the free market - again by way of contrast I happen to think the free market is a disastrous way to run economies and societies but in Britain, the Third Way, has become a continuation of the destructive project began by Margaret Thatcher.

Does it bother me that neocons have my e-mail address and my photos of the British Museum? Frankly Facebook data is so trivial they are welcome to it - and to the process of commercialising friendship and the frivolous.

All this leaves me though thinking: What is it I’m missing?

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