Living carefully

In recent riffs with Rupert Murdoch and with the Author’s Guild et al., CEO Eric Schmidt '76 has pledged that Google’s mission is to organize the world’s information. But despite the magnitude and the implications of this endeavor, Google has always seemed to use its growing power for good. Its commitment to not being evil has made Google trustworthy, a de facto guardian of a changing web.

But though Google hasn’t been evil and Eric Schmidt doesn’t have the looks of some megalomaniacal mastermind, that doesn’t mean that this mission to organize the world’s information shouldn’t give us pause. There are very obvious dangers to the world Google has helped mold, and the one it seeks to create. And though many have contemplated the dangers that arise from Google’s information guzzling as just a condition of the modern web, a few events over the past few months — all occurring within the Princeton bubble — have made me question whether “don’t be evil” is something different than “do good.”

A student whose name I will not use — for reasons that, if not now, will be clear by the end of this column — recently posed nude in a pornographic magazine. Poorly executed and generally in poor taste, this particular magazine has garnered substantial attention for doing something that spat in the face of every stereotype of Ivy League students; namely, that we are socially withdrawn, if not inept, and unattractive, if not nerdy, shutins. This Princeton student defied both stereotypes and justified her decision to model in terms of sexual liberation and expression.

Did she do something evil or depraved? I certainly don’t think so.

And yet, free to pose nude, immune from any moral judgments on my end and taking a strong stand on free artistic expression and against arbitrary social conventions — despite all this, my initial response to this student’s decision was one of condemnation and critique. “How stupid of her,” I thought.

Upon closer reflection, my indulgence in sanctimony was not what it would seem. I was not narrow-minded enough to call her a slut or her decision classless, only jaded enough to see her actions in terms of her future prospects in the corporate or academic worlds (as if the world beyond Princeton consists of these spheres alone).

As she herself admitted, being searchable on Google is a scary prospect and something she wished to, but has failed to avoid. That failure is something that she will have to live with, a certain deterrent to future would-be Princeton pinups.

Most of us know that we are all Googleable, all subject to historical inquiries from our future. The implicit worry then is that one day our childhood antics, or at least episodes we’d rather forget — whether that means burning a dead squirrel or suing the University for denying proper disability services — cannot be forgotten. Google isn’t evil, but it also doesn’t forget. And this makes it and the tech zeitgeist it informs dangerous.

Yes we have all been told to be careful about what we post on our Facebooks and that the internet can be dangerous. But real-time social media, blogs, location-based social networking — all of these innovations have created a dynamic in which technology, which used to be a tool for the real world, is now reacting to it. It is, for lack of better analogies, Frankenstein’s monster of social media.

What we never expected was that we would have to start being careful about what we do in our everyday life. Suddenly, we are all celebrities. We have followers. Our photos are the new gossip magazines. But with this celebrity comes susceptibility to scandal. Does this mean that we have started to live more carefully than what used to be normal — for fear that the information guzzlers will play “gotcha” on us?

Thankfully, that has not yet become the case, but this encroachment of the web into the real world has already happened, and the brave new world I have conjured is not so unrealistic.

Not quite the cautionary tale as much as it is the antecedent to the cautionary tale, the story — a stretch of a word, if I’ve ever seen one — of Princeton’s “Tribe” was covered by Ivygateblog.com with online commentators going so far as to name the girls. What did they do to deserve this attention? A harmless, if possibly Mean Girl-esque, joke, is nothing compared to what goes on at other schools. But the Ivy League curiosity sparked by a few Facebook photos and active gossip engines made this different, relegating the story and the girls involved to an unsolicited and lasting position in cyberspace.

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Information used to be degradable, but now it’s permanent. Interesting information has become some super-abundant commodity with seemingly infinite demand. In this current tech zeitgeist — Googlism — we are all celebrities, and one day, not so far in the future, we may act more deliberately, more carefully out of a real, justified paranoia that the paparrazi of social media will play “gotcha” and give our real-world embarrassments a permanent digital footprint.

Googlism isn’t evil. But it has eyes on all of us and doesn’t forget.

Peter Zakin is a sophomore from New York. He can be reached at pzakin@princeton.edu.