SUNDANCE FILM FESTIVAL: Showing as part of the World Documentary Competition, for me Google and the World Brain, like many stories that deal with the Internet and its portents, is a reminder to get more of the kind of information that can’t be optimised into my life. More experience, more people, more places.
Lewis incorporates the many important angles to this story
Perhaps that reaction, the impulse to defy with touch or a whisper the rapid transformation of the known world into searchable data, is normal. As You Are Not a Gadget author Jarod Lanier points out in Ben Lewis’s bracingly lucid account of Google’s attempt to digitise the world’s books, the scheme of all science fiction is to propose, over and over, that people don’t really matter, and then to prove, against dystopic odds, that they do. We seek reassurance, as the scenarios H.G. Wells laid out 80 years ago come to pass, that the fever for absolute knowledge won’t subsume what is human.
The larger question posed by Lewis’s documentary, which traces the international furor that followed Google’s barreling forward with their digitisation efforts, is whether we can trust the gentle giants of Mountain View, California. If Google is made of people—not just thousands of employees but you and me—as one author quoted here suggests, why shouldn’t we?
When Google first began approaching major libraries—including that on the Harvard campus, which houses 17 million books—with their offer to turn enormous collections into searchable files, instantly available to the entire world, many of the parties involved saw it as a lucky break. What was in it for Google, a company, as Evgeny Morozov notes here, pitched as a social reformer that just happens to make a lot of money, was initially unclear. Much about Google is unclear by design; its reputation for secrecy and fervor for transparency and accessibility are at rather pointed odds. Only one spokesperson appears here, a jolly Indian man whose paeans to the company have a way of swerving into religious terrain.
Mostly we hear from academics, librarians, authors, and the leading thinkers on the Internet. What first sounded like a happy plan—an extension of the democratic ideal of the library—turned sour when Google began scanning books that are still subject to copyright protection. Something about adding contemporary authors to the project cast its mercenary angles into relief: 'A book is not just an extra-long tweet," Lanier says. Nor is it so much content to be forked onto the pile and optimised for advertising profit. And what about the intel Google is collecting from all those readers 'freely’ partaking of its library?
It’s not a stunt the company, known for acting first and answering questions later, would have tried with the film or television industries; studios have better lawyers. Book publishing is seen as more of a lame duck, perhaps even welcoming of exploitation if it gets the word out. Not quite, as Google discovered when the big libraries, publishers, and authors guilds around the world struck back with lawsuits. Their outcomes, many of which are still pending, are less about getting paid (the lawyers collected the bulk of a $100m-plus settlement with the Author’s Guild) than setting a precedent.
Lewis incorporates the many important angles to this story into a well-proportioned whole. Animated flourishes offset the dreaded talking head syndrome, and along with travelling to China, Japan, Germany, and France to flesh out the story’s international dimension, he includes a reasonable variety of perspectives—skeptics, anti-skeptics, and those in-between. Rather than yanking you in any one direction, Google and the World Brain will give your place on that spectrum a healthy, human tweak.
