THE BANALITY OF NOT BEING EVIL

By Philip J Cunningham


There’s something irremediably banal about Google’s corporate motto. It’s hip, it’s hype and it’s hypocritical.

"Don't be evil" is a curiously negative construct; eschewing evil is not necessarily about doing good. In sum, a sophomoric yet shrewd manner of self-presentation that is not without its believers.

It speaks to the informal, idealistic ethos of a student-run Silicon Valley garage start-up, even though Google is now a multibillion-dollar entity with nearly 20,000 employees and computer links and arrays vast enough to map, copy and store billions and billions of private bits, day after day.

But pretending not to be a big company does not make Google a small company any more than their witty motto means they are doing good.

There are numerous shades of gray between not doing evil and evil, especially if one’s core business is information mining in service of advertising.

Neither the super suave Mad Men nor real life ad men pretend their business is about maintaining a high moral standard. Advertising, an ethically-challenged field of endeavor in the best of times, favors the big-wigs rich enough to afford its product, while seeking to indoctrinate the little guy, --capitalism’s answer to communist propaganda.

But Google’s difficulty in hewing to its motto extends beyond ad revenue to brave new frontiers of surveillance, digital profiling, and the questionable storage of vast information files on individuals that would be the envy of the old Stasi or KGB.

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IS AMERICA LOSING IT?

BY PHILIP J CUNNINGHAM

It's one thing when fear of terror causes people to lose their nerve, quite another when they start losing their minds.

The Obama administration appears to be on the verge of a nervous breakdown.

It's not clear if it's terrorists, real and imagined, who have got the Democratic establishment all jittery or if it's just the usual Republican Party suspects, know-nothings in all important respects except for their uncanny ability to unnerve their Democratic rivals.

President Obama, like many a Democratic pol from the days of LBJ onward, seems spellbound by calls from the right that he be tough on terror, bullish on "free markets" and aggressive in military affairs.

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