Google v China or “Rollerball Redux”

Google and China are involved in an information war. Not a PR thing, they are battling in the ultimate arena; exchange.

People who’ve read Reading Virtual Minds Vol. 1: Science and History and my various blog posts know about fair-exchange, information commerce and the like. Basically whatever goods or services are bought, sold, bartered, …, it all comes down to an exchange of information (from a pure social-semiotic perspective).

If you’re watching carefully I think you’ll notice that this is the most recent (note, most recent, not the first although the first I know of in this century) demonstration of a company, a business, challenging a country for information (again remembering/recognizing that “information” is the ultimate exchange). This is not the metaphorically unwinnable “land war in Asia”, this is for the ultimately unwinnable control of “what people know and how they get what they know”

Anybody remember the original James Caan “Rollerball”? Governments were gone or ineffectual and companies ruled the world. The “opiate of the masses” wasn’t Marx’s religion, it was the hyperviolent Rollerball.

And if Google really is capturing all that data about people that the anxious out there believe they are gathering, hyperviolence is going to be the least of our worries.

I mean, have you played some of those xBox games lately?