Googleopoly

Once I Built A Railroad, Made It Run
Made it race against time
Once I built a railroad, now it's done
Brother can you spare a dime?

Once I built a tower to the sun
Brick and rivet and lime
Once I built a tower, now it's done
Brother can you spare a dime?

                        Brother, Can You Spare a Dime?

An article recently appeared in the conservative website, "The American Conservative" about the antitrust suit against Google. They referenced the previous antitrust suits against the likes of AT&T and Microsoft. They could have brought up Standard Oil and IBM as well. Back then the Rockefellers, the Carnegies, and the Morgans were the robber barons who held the power behind the throne, ruled the marketplace, and by extension, the world. 

The beginning of empire is so much fun.

Incredible people went against the one percent of their day. They dared to raise a judicial stick to knock the top hats from the oligarchs' heads. In an earlier time it might have been the heads themselves. Men like Roosevelt (both of them) who dared challenge the authority, power, and, most of all, wealth of excess hovering over society like the downwind draft of a richly ornamented corpse. Think Roman baths as outhouses.

The heyday of empire is like that

Yes, they built railroads. Made them run! At least they did that. But they also built empires and made them run, too. They made laws and then corrupted them. Preached piety and then blasphemed. Incited foreign grievances and then supported petty dictators to enslave whole countries. They flaunted their wealth like gods and then buried the consequences in a hell of their own making along with their victims. Democracy became a mantra of slavery.

Other men of conviction tried to limit their power before it became too corrupt for polite society. We can tolerate a certain amount of corruption and extravagant displays of wealth, as long as there are windfalls for peasants like us once in a while. The prosperity of the 1950’s didn’t invent itself. Those trains have to run on time if they are to run at all, after all. But the owner-barons always want more. More power. More prestige. More wealth. And then they are brought down.

Of course, as good as their intentions were, the trust busters only managed to create shadow companies that were all owned by the same cabal of railroad builders, financiers, and thieves. Rockefeller never got poorer, just not as public. The best they could do was to delay them a bit until they regrouped, regrew, and rebuilt their next railroad.

Of the top ten richest people on Forbes’ list today, none makes an actual product. Two, Bill Gates and Larry Ellison, make software, which is almost a tangible thing. Almost something you can hold in your hand or eat. The rest are listed as belonging to ‘Fashion and Retail,’ ‘Finance and Investment,’ and ‘Technology.’ Several Waltons, Barkers of the Box Store, are on the list and are listed as moguls of ‘Fashion and Retail.’ Seriously? Have you seen what people wear to Walmart?

Two, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, work for Google which is listed as ‘Technology.’ I guess there is technology in voyeurism, checking up on old x’es, and porn queries. If you took them both together like the results of a bad Google query, they would be worth 100 billion, which makes them rich person number two on the list should they ever merge together in one glob of keywords. Quite the modern railroad they’ve got there.

The top dog at the country club, Jeff Bezos of Amazon, is listed as ‘Technology’ as well. So the two most highly valued companies in our capitalocracy are product sales and propaganda. A modern-day medieval market.

And like any market, from the souks of Baghdad, the Gom on Red Square, the Wet Markets of Wuhan, Rockefeller Center in Midtown Manhattan, not to mention the old carts of the lower east side, or every country fair in the fields of every peasant village ever, you hear the same cries from the same barkers:

25% off!
Subscribe!
Today only!
Free Sample!
Miracle product!
One click shopping!
Trust our algorithm!
Come one, come all!
Marvel at my click bait!
Click my ‘Like’ button!
Exotic products from the far east!
Forgotten wisdom of the ancients!
Click here to see the new wonder product!

And inevitably,

Attend!
Buy my teleology!
Worship at my alter!
Vote for my candidate!
Only a moron would vote for theirs!
Wisdom of the Ages!
Believe!
Click!

Oh, this last one is dressed up as much as any miracle cure from the shamans of Shambhala. But the results are the same.

Buy it.
Vote for me.
Take what I sell.
Think what I say.
Do as I command.
Worship at my temple.
Swallow my soundbite.
Think no further than this.
Obey!

We are inundated by the manipulation of the senses. At least in medieval times we could go back to our peasant villages after the flurry of dopamine died down. There were no telescreens in the huts. Our lives are divided between the profane and the sublime, yet the profane is tantalizing and the sublime is pedantic. Who wouldn’t prefer a pitch and a promise to a hard life?

And a lonely voice speaks truth to power, preaches brotherly love amidst greed, and points to the temporal nature of riches and the eternity of something better; a thing that can’t be weighed in a scale or sold by the click; and then, in the next generation, more lonely voices speak again as each generation forgets the lessons of the last and wanders back to the barker in the straw hat and the pinstriped website. We prefer soap boxes to pulpits.

Each generation had its own evils and corruption, its own words to describe its own situation, its own disdain for the past and myth of the future, and its own conmen plying the same sins under a different name. It has been an uphill battle with few visible victories, those mostly local and parochial. Rarely seen at the level of society as a whole.

A man can be reasoned with, with time and the right conditions. Men are corrupt. Salvation happens one soul at a time. Nations fall en masse. Fascism comes with the face of an angel. 

The end of empire is not so much fun.

Once I had a search engine, made it run…