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Original URL:
http://www.azstarnet.com/star/sun/30706-FRIEDMAN-COLUMN-NYT.html
Google as God: It sees and knows everything
THE NEW YORK TIMES
July 6, 2003
By Thomas L. Friedman
Since 9/11 the world has felt increasingly fragmented. Reading the papers, one
senses that many Americans are emotionally withdrawing from the world and that
the world is drifting away from America. The powerful sense of integration that
the
go-go-globalizing 1990s created, the sense that the world was shrinking from a
size medium to a size small, feels over now.
The reality, though, is quite different. While you were sleeping after 9/11, not
only has the process of technological integration continued, it has actually
intensified - and this will have profound implications.
I recently went out to Silicon Valley to visit the offices of Google, the
world's most popular search engine. It is a mind-bending experience. You can
actually sit in front of a monitor and watch a sample of everything that
everyone in the world is searching for. (Hint: sex, God, jobs and, oh my word,
professional wrestling usually top the lists.)
In the past three years, Google has gone from processing 100 million searches
per day to more than 200 million searches per day. And get this: Only one-third
come from inside the United States. The rest are in 88 other languages. "The
rate of the adoption of the Internet in all its forms is increasing, not
decreasing," says Eric Schmidt, Google's CEO. "The fact that many (Internet
companies) are in a terrible state does not correlate with users not using their
products."
VeriSign, which operates much of the Internet's infrastructure, was processing
600 million domain requests per day in early 2000. It's now processing 9 billion
per day. A domain request is anytime anyone types in .com or .net. And you ain't
seen nothin' yet.
Within the next few years you will be able to be both mobile and totally
connected, thanks to the pending explosion of Wi-Fi, or wireless fidelity. Using
radio technology, Wi-Fi will provide high-speed connection from your laptop
computer or PDA to the Internet from anywhere - McDonald's, the beach or your
library.
Says Alan Cohen, a VP of Airespace, a new Wi-Fi provider: "If I can operate
Google, I can find anything. And with wireless, it means I will be able to find
anything, anywhere, anytime. Which is why I say that Google, combined with Wi-Fi,
is a little bit like God. God is wireless, God is everywhere and God sees and
knows everything. Throughout history, people connected to God without wires.
Now, for many questions in the world, you ask Google, and increasingly, you can
do it without wires, too."
In other words, once Wi-Fi is in place, with one little Internet connection I
can download anything from anywhere and I can spread anything from anywhere.
That is good news for both scientists and terrorists, pro-Americans and
anti-Americans.
And that brings me to the point of this column: While we may be emotionally
distancing ourselves from the world, the world is getting more integrated. That
means that what people think of us, as Americans, will matter more, not less.
Because people outside America will be able to build alliances more efficiently
in the world we are entering and they will be able to reach out and touch us -
whether with computer viruses or anthrax recipes downloaded from the Internet -
more than ever.
"The key point is not just whether people hate us," says Robert Wright, the
author of "Nonzero," a highly original book on the integrated world. "The key
point is that it matters more now whether people hate us, and will keep
mattering more, for technological reasons. I don't mean just homemade WMDs. I am
talking about the way information technology - everyone using e-mail, Wi-Fi and
Google - will make it much easier for small groups to rally like-minded people,
crystallize diffuse hatreds and mobilize lethal force.
"And wait until the whole world goes broadband. Broadband - a much richer
Internet service that brings video on demand to your PC - will revolutionize
recruiting, because video is such an emotionally powerful medium. Ever seen one
of Osama bin Laden's recruiting videos? They're very effective, and they'll
reach their targeted audience much more efficiently via broadband."
None of this means we, America, just have to do what the world wants, but we do
have to take it seriously, and we do have to be good listeners. We, America,
"have to work even harder to build bridges," argues Wright, because info-tech,
left to its own devices, will make it so much easier for small groups to build
their own little island kingdoms. And their island kingdoms, which may not seem
important or potent now, will be able to touch us more, not less.
* Thomas L. Friedman is a columnist for The New York Times.
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