Good Grief
Modern Life Is War - Last MI show
“But I know we’re coming closer to the end of whatever this has been.
When you’re 16 you don’t know what forever means. When you are 23 you couldn’t be more sorry to say. That after all this growing up together all the good has gone away. Sometimes the boys that should be yours best friends become strangers with familiar faces.”
Google is where we go for answers. People used to go elsewhere or, more likely, stagger along not knowing. Nowadays you can’t have a long dinner-table argument about who won the Oscar for that Neil Simon movie where she plays an actress who doesn’t win an Oscar; at any moment someone will pull out a pocket device and Google it. If you need the art-history meaning of “picturesque,” you could find it in The Book of Answers, compiled two decades ago by the New York Public Library’s reference desk, but you won’t. Part of Google’s mission is to make the books of answers redundant (and the reference librarians, too). “A hamadryad is a wood-nymph, also a poisonous snake in India, and an Abyssinian baboon,” says the narrator of John Banville’s 2009 novel, The Infinities. “It takes a god to know a thing like that.” Not anymore.
The business of finding facts has been an important gear in the workings of human knowledge, and the technology has just been upgraded from rubber band to nuclear reactor. No wonder there’s some confusion about Google’s exact role in that—along with increasing fear about its power and its intentions.
“The logical conclusion of our relationship to computers: expectantly to type “what is the meaning of my life” into Google.” - Alain de Botton
read it.
