The matrix has you.

Over the years, I've adopted a Google-centric eschatology. We're all going to die. Probably painfully. And probably at the hands of a terrifying superbusiness that will grow into a beast of Revolution--with the face of a man with a mustache and a clean fast search engine tailored to your personality and individual pheromone scent*.

It will suck out all our innate natural knowledge and replace it with neatly-tagged, conveniently available information about reality. It is a grisly thing: a slim, trim, sleek steel giant with scales and muscles, powerful visible jugular veins--iron claws of death. It eats things. It is alive, like a sentinel invading the last human civilization, drilling through the elements of the earth with pure mechanistic rage.

I am convinced. Just say its name: Google!! Huzzah, behold the glorious!

The neatness!
The simplicity!
The power!

This is the way of things.

* * *

Google’s business model is similar to a lot of other web-based businesses—and that is advertising, advertising, advertising. Their product is you. They make money off of you. They sell you. They own you. After they have seduced you through the use of clean, organized information and colorful graphics, they bank that you will return: again, and again, and again. And they sell that certainty to executives and people with lots of money who want to see their name come up first: who want to see their DBA in the little “Sponsored Links” box. Face the reality, friends. Google has you in their steel palms; you are metaphorically encapsulated in little red sacs of amnion, powering their super-intelligent machines.

From Fast Company Magazine:

“Google understands that its two most important assets are the attention and trust of its users. If it takes too long to deliver results or an additional word of text on the home page is too distracting, Google risks losing people's attention. If the search results are lousy, or if they are compromised by advertising, it risks losing people's trust. Attention and trust are sacrosanct...The cardinal rule at Google is, If you can do something that will improve the user's experience, do it.”

“If enough users like it, it will have real power with advertisers. And traffic for advertisers will beget even more traffic for advertisers. Advertisers don't just pay a set rate, or even a cost per thousand viewers. They bid on the search term. The more an advertiser is willing to pay, the higher its ad will be positioned.”

But why all the fluff? Why take photos of every home in the country and make it free, widely available information? Why create a virtual map of the moon? Well, Google, I ask you: why did the machines make the Matrix? Why construct an over-elaborate, unnecessarily complex “prison for the mind”? The answer is seductively simple, of course: to keep our minds and spirits soaring, while they (Google) peddle our internet usage for cash. Oh, that, and they have a hidden agenda to totalitarianly control humanity. You know, just that.

Of course, everyone wants to be Google. Hey, I want to be Google. Web-businesses everywhere are following suit, if they dare. I personally think they are no match for the artful sexiness that emanates from Google's slack jowls. But you never know. Microsoft took a whack at it with bing.com. Gotta say I love the commercials, but the search engine, notsomuch, ggkthx. (By the way 1337-speak is making a (0m3b4(|{!)



Oh, but yeah... Microsoft tries everything once.

Zune? Fail.

I'm a PC? I'm sure you are.

Yeah, never mind. You will sooo never be Google, Microsoft. Back off!!

Ask Jeeves' dropped Jeeves somewhere along the roadside and now is just Ask.com. That's pretty sweet. Ask. Ask me something. Ask. It's imperative. For some reason, "Google" is just not imperative. "Ask" is a little threatening. Google is seemingly goofy and lighthearted. Goo. Like flubber. Goog. Googleplex. A google of geese. Sure, Ask cleaned up their site to look more like Google--but it still just isn't as awesome. Ask.com = fail.

* * *

How will Google's avant-garde approach to business change the face of commercialism forever? Well, I have some ideas:

Firstly, Google has been one of the strongest pushers of the online world as we know it. In the last decade, a commercial empire has risen from the tendrils and loins of "portal sites" such as Google...making otherwise nobody websites easily accessible with just a simple keyword. This means that the success of Google has impacted innumerable businesses with its gateways into the mainstream.

Secondly, email will never be the same. Gmail has kicked the crap out of its competitors. Sorry, Yahoo.

Thirdly, the notion of user-focused industry and colliquial, "we-are-people-too" approach has definitely filtered into other business models--and quite effectively. Just look at Wikipedia, or Facebook. These sites are entirely user-driven, and appear somewhat nice and kind. Much of their revenue is generated through advertisements. This is the Google business model hard at work.

* * *

When I think of the end of the world at the hands of Google, I’m reminded of Winston, when he is about to be executed, sitting before a poster of Big Brother and men with guns. Why did he, Winston, ever think to question the authority of that mustached master? Of course Winston loved Big Brother—just as we love Google. That clean interface. Those harmlessly humorous graphics. The more they give us, the more we are hooked—like Victory Gin, or cocaine. What right do we have to even think that Google could possibly have been the Antichrist! Aha! That’s right—you have no right!

Only we find ourselves warm and cozy, snug inside our ignorance, inside Bradbury’s parlor walls. Technicolor never felt so good.

"He gazed up at the enormous face. Forty years it had taken him to learn what kind of smile was hidden beneath the dark mustache. O cruel, needless misunderstanding! O stubborn, self-willed exile from the loving breast! Two gin-scented tears trickled down the sides of his nose. But it was all right, everything was all right, the struggle was finished. He had won the victory over himself. He loved Big Brother."

* * *

*Dear Google blog patrol, I promise that I love Google and have not committed thoughtcrime. This is just a passive-aggressive outlet for my late-teenage angst.

Dear classmates, if they come for me, I plead the first.