If you like reading about philosophy, here’s a free, weekly newsletter with articles just like this one: Send it to me!
Today marks the birthday of Sergey Brin of Google fame (born August 21, 1973) and the first public presentation of William Burroughs’ calculating machine in 1888. The calculating machine formed the basis of a company that made some of the first modern computers, Unisys. Google was officially launched 110 years later.
Sergey Brin, who along with Larry Page founded Google, is sometimes credited with the statement that “knowledge is always good, and certainly better than ignorance,” which forms the basis for Google’s mission statement “to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.” He’s also behind the infamous, unofficial Google motto “Don’t be evil,” which Google recently (2018) found appropriate to drop from the preface of its code of conduct, once more demonstrating how youthful ideals get eroded by power, greed, and what is generally perceived as pragmatism in business.
Image source: Wikipedia
While Brin is not a philosopher, his life’s work, the creation of Google and Alphabet, has so fundamentally transformed society that it is infinitely more relevant to philosophy and society than the works of most people who call themselves philosophers in academia.
Google has not only changed the way we all (including philosophers) search for knowledge, how we manage and publish it, but also how we reach our audience and how we interact with each other. It has caused the decline of traditional publishing and the rise of YouTube celebrities and social media influencers. Google and its researchers brought us the final defeat of humans to machines in the game of Go, the decline of concentration and attention in reading, a global threat to human rights, privacy and dignity, the commodisation of human beings, advanced tax evasion, free culture, the sharing economy and the killer robots of Boston Dynamics.
Recommended for you:
August 23: Happy Birthday, #hashtag!
The symbol #, which we today call the hashtag, has had a profound influence on our culture, from IRC and Twitter to #MeToo. It was invented on August 23, 2007.
They also brought back the previously outmoded concept of a king: arguably, Sergey Brin, Larry Page, Mark Zuckerberg, Bill Gates, Elon Musk and Tim Cook deserve the royal title just as much as, if not more than, Louis XIV and Elizabeth II. They lead economies many times the size of small countries, are free of the interference of commoners in their governance, can ignore democratic laws at will, are not accountable for their decisions, can censor content and exclude users by creating arbitrary rules out …
Read the full article which is published on Daily Philosophy (external link)
