Don’t Be Evil … Surrender To All Evil
January 25, 2006
Posted by Resident Egoist in : Culture , trackback
Google has explicitly adopted a new motto today: “Surrender To All Evil” — the exact opposite of its previous one: “Don’t Be Evil”. It has agreed to the censorship of its search results in accordance with the wishes of the fascist, Chinese State. How is it going to do this? By launching a new “customized” Google.cn site which will circumvent the Chinese government’s current firewalling of the main Google.com domain.
And just like Microsoft, Yahoo, and Cisco — among others — Google has manufactured its own rationalization of its coupling with the Devil.
Via Breitbart.com:
Google officials characterized the censorship concessions in China as an excruciating decision for a company that adopted “don’t be evil” as a motto. But management believes it’s a worthwhile sacrifice.
“We firmly believe, with our culture of innovation, Google can make meaningful and positive contributions to the already impressive pace of development in China,” said Andrew McLaughlin, Google’s senior policy counsel.
Yep, you heard that right: “a worthwhile sacrifice”! I wonder which word it is people misunderstand the most: “worthwhile” or “sacrifice”? I am inclined to believe that it is the latter, however. But there’s nothing to worry about here. We are all bound to understand the meaning of these words some day — some of us, (or should I say, most of us?), the “hard” way.
Now, for an exercise in unfunny humor, you really should try comparing search results between the two sites, that is, between google.com and google.cn. And if I may suggest some terms, you may want to try out the standards “Tiananmen Square,” “Human Rights,” “Taiwan Independence,” “Liberty,” etc … After that, if you’re still having fun, try “Ayn Rand,” “Capitalism,” and “Mises.”
On these three latter terms, Google itself should make certain to look them up — it might just help them learn the actual meanings of the words “capitalism” and “sacrifice” … and possibly bring them back closer to Ludwig von Mises’ motto: Do not give in to evil, but proceed ever more boldly against it.
Technorati Tags: Google, Censorship, Freedom of Speech, China
Comments
Hmmmm.
I linked first, then asked questions later. I just did this with both Tiananmen and Ayn Rand, and the only substantive difference I saw on a cursory look was that the terms were highlighted at google.cn (but not at google.com). In the case of Rand, a link with “anti-communist” in it came up, not highlighted. So I plugged that term in and saw that all the subsequent search results came in highlighted.
Might google.cn work better outside of China, then?
Gus
Hmm… you seem to be right on the results of the search for the “Ayn Rand” terms. I don’t know why, but I couldn’t find a link to ARI from google.cn last night. I don’t think any links to ARI would work from China however. Wikipedia is known to be a forbidden site in China, yet its article on Ayn Rand still appears in the results.
And why would Google go to the trouble of customizing their Chinese site, and admit to submission to censorship if there were no variations in the search results outputed by the two sites? And of course, if the results were truly the same, why did the Politburo firewall google.com before?
As to the “Tiananmen” search, the results for me still seem to be very different. I may be doing something wrong, though — so a link to your results would be very much appreciated.
I also have more unfunny humor you might want to check out: this is the English version of my search results for “Tiananmen”. Look for the crudely translated message right before the begining of the results as well as the one at the end of the page.
Have fun
!
R-E,
Sorry to be so long getting back on this, but my employer’s firewall blocks sites that translate web pages!
I haven’t the time to pursue this now, but it looks like I probably am doing something wrong. I get identical results again but for highlighting with “freedom”, but Curtis Weeks clearly got a different answer.
Gus
No sweat Gus. I myself just got back home since my previous comment. I think the radio boxes under the google.cn search box may be the cause of the different results we keep getting. I’ll have to investigate further later and get back to you.
R-E,
The PC link is, BTW, a parody.
Gus
A parody indeed — although I had a hard time decoding what “PC” meant. I would also have noted that I got different results for a “freedom” search at google.cn, but I see that CGW was only expressing his artistic skills in Impressionism … still a parody though.
Anywho, you might like this article from News.com — which indicates that google.cn is even more restrictive than its competitors (Yahoo! and MSN) in the search results it produces.