Sunday, May 15, 2005
Time * Place
I should be able to type "Bremen 1435" (or "Washington D.C.", 1965) into Google, and get a cluster of historical evidence. And I should be able to get notified, as more digitized evidence goes live.
Thursday, May 05, 2005
Googling towards reality
History is written by the victors, and news is written by the priviledged. The majority, however, live in reality.
As the Internet pushes into the lives of more people, it is possible to envision a world where this gap is bridged, where authority lies with the population, with their collective knowledge, not with the easily manipulated minds of corporate journalists, hanging around the corridors of power.
To bridge the gap, Internet authorities need to muddle their way towards a broader picture of the world. When I search for Haiti, for example, I want to see the physical evidence of its extreme poverty & strife. I'd like to see a history of its centuries of colonization and manipulation. I want hard data to be available, to a person thinking about these things, which allows them to demonstrate that the purpose of this abuse is to maximize profit. I want the relationships and the profits and the environmental destruction caused by multintaional corporations to be visible.
This is undeniable reality, on the ground, throughout the world, and the vast majority of the world's population is aware of it. Generally, the educated classes in the US, and abroad, are not.
That's where Google comes in.
Although there are more voices on the net, and better access to information than ever before, when I type "Haiti" into the Google I still get nothing important. I get: spin, publicity, 'official news', 'cia facts' ... nothing that tells me what's going on.
The closest thing to Haiti's reality on Google is this satellite photo.
How do I find the toxic dumps? How do I find the 'free trade' manufacturing facilities, which abuse labor to the breaking point, in order to increase profits? How do I see the prime agricultural land held by Dole, Del Monte, Chiquita, etc., seized by force from farmers over and over again? How do I find what the people in Haiti want to do about this situation, now that their first elected government was just dissolved by US government intervention? And how do I discover that fact?
Google has a long way to go. This isn't easy, so I'm going to help.
As the Internet pushes into the lives of more people, it is possible to envision a world where this gap is bridged, where authority lies with the population, with their collective knowledge, not with the easily manipulated minds of corporate journalists, hanging around the corridors of power.
To bridge the gap, Internet authorities need to muddle their way towards a broader picture of the world. When I search for Haiti, for example, I want to see the physical evidence of its extreme poverty & strife. I'd like to see a history of its centuries of colonization and manipulation. I want hard data to be available, to a person thinking about these things, which allows them to demonstrate that the purpose of this abuse is to maximize profit. I want the relationships and the profits and the environmental destruction caused by multintaional corporations to be visible.
This is undeniable reality, on the ground, throughout the world, and the vast majority of the world's population is aware of it. Generally, the educated classes in the US, and abroad, are not.
That's where Google comes in.
Although there are more voices on the net, and better access to information than ever before, when I type "Haiti" into the Google I still get nothing important. I get: spin, publicity, 'official news', 'cia facts' ... nothing that tells me what's going on.
The closest thing to Haiti's reality on Google is this satellite photo.
How do I find the toxic dumps? How do I find the 'free trade' manufacturing facilities, which abuse labor to the breaking point, in order to increase profits? How do I see the prime agricultural land held by Dole, Del Monte, Chiquita, etc., seized by force from farmers over and over again? How do I find what the people in Haiti want to do about this situation, now that their first elected government was just dissolved by US government intervention? And how do I discover that fact?
Google has a long way to go. This isn't easy, so I'm going to help.
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