An Experiment in Scotch

Because the inter­net is such a big place, occa­sion­ally you will read some­thing that is so pro­foundly wrong that at first you are sure it’s par­ody and only later, does it come clear that the author is in fact earnestly try­ing to argue for some­thing based on a fun­da­men­tal mis­un­der­stand­ing of how the world works these days. The lat­est exam­ple I’ve seen of this is this com­men­tary by Henry Porter in The Guardian that makes more dumb state­ments in 500 words or so than I’ve ever seen. Among them:

• Google doesn’t pro­duce anything
• Google doesn’t have the right to con­trol the con­tent it offers on YouTube.
• Google should have to pay what­ever roy­alty amount an artist demands for YouTube videos.
• Google is a monop­oly (how can one be a monop­oly and not pro­duce any­thing?) and there is no other way to get con­tent out to users other than YouTube.
• With­out old-style news­pa­pers, democ­racy will crumble.
• Google Street View invades the pri­vacy of cit­i­zens. (The irony that this is a British writer who lives in one of the most privacy-insensitive places in the world with all the cam­eras they have watch­ing peo­ple is appar­ently lost on Porter as is the deli­cious irony that Google Street View is a prod­uct of Google.)
• Google is an amoral menace.

I know that this man is clearly an anachro­nism, long­ing for a time far past that can never return and would undoubt­edly be detri­men­tal if it did return. I feel sorry for his obvi­ous bit­ter­ness at a world changed before him but that doesn’t excuse the fact that he’s writ­ing in a major paper fun­da­men­tal inac­cu­ra­cies about, well, every­thing he writes. It’s called com­men­tary which excuses it in the news­pa­per world but that’s just a cop-out. In any other pro­fes­sion, mak­ing this many mis­takes in so short a period of time would war­rant his dis­missal. This is yet another rea­son why news­pa­pers are failing.

I can’t fathom some­one so con­fused as to look at Google and say they don’t pro­duce any­thing. Per­haps there is noth­ing tan­gi­ble to the old coot, but then there’s noth­ing tan­gi­ble pro­duced by his local pub or mom and pop mar­ket. These types of com­pa­nies are what is col­lo­qui­ally called “ser­vice providers”. They don’t actu­ally pro­duce things, they pro­vide ser­vices. How it is that he can both work for a major news­pa­per in Britain and yet fail to com­pre­hend such a fun­da­men­tal fact is beyond me. Again, it seems like it would be grounds for dis­missal in any other profession.

His asser­tions that artists should be able to charge what­ever they want and Google should not only have to bear the costs of the roy­alty demands but also the costs of host­ing the con­tent for free on YouTube is ridicu­lous on its face. Google should no more have to do that than a pub­lisher should have to pay some third-rate author what­ever he demands.

I put off writ­ing about this arti­cle for over a week because it just seemed so sad that I wasn’t sure it war­ranted a response. But in the end, it’s these kinds of “voices” that have to be pointed out and held to task for things to improve. I’m sure that there has always been peo­ple like Porter resist­ing tech­no­log­i­cal change to the end and the world has pro­gressed quite fine. How­ever, ignor­ing the fact that peo­ple like this still work for major news­pa­pers and are allowed paid to write such tripe is a mis­take. He says noth­ing true and noth­ing of value. Arti­cles like this shouldn’t make it past the edi­tors’ desk.