Future shock: How we allowed google to enslave humanity

Today, Big Tech CEOs insult our intelligence by donning gravy-stained T-shirts to desperately project an approachable “everyman” image. The late Jeeves’s legacy seems to be an unspoken acknowledgement that the digital generation simply don’t trust suits.

Despite scrappy aesthetics and limited bandwidth, the embryonic mid-90s internet was a societal atom bomb – the Big Bang of Big Data. Newbie start-ups Google, Yahoo! and Ask Jeeves rapidly amassed an incalculable amount of information on their users – and it didn’t take Silicon Valley’s bearded libertine coders long to figure out what to do with it.

Certainly, political parties and pressure groups know what to do with it. It’s admirable that the SNP are willing to voice concerns over third-party Facebook apps (see last week’s Sunday Herald), but the party certainly wasn’t so vocal when they paid Mark Zuckerberg’s firm £100,000 to target potential voters.

Hypocritical certainly, but this modest spend does pale in comparison to the Tories’ £2 million and Labour’s £577,000. You can’t stay clean when playing in the muck with the bad boys. So how did politics devolve into such undignified desperation for web presence? The answer is Google.

The first simple aggregating search engines were developed in the early 90s by Californian proto-hipsters, who were possibly just competing to come up with the wackiest company name. Such guileless, nerdy branding as Yahoo! perfectly illustrated the youthful naivety and exuberance of the dot.com boom. Subterfuge or not, the public initially detected little ambition behind these start-ups.

Many of the early runners fell at the first hurdle – perhaps Jeeves should have changed into a trackie.

Without much fuss, the awesome data crunching prowess of Google simply sucked the oxygen away from all competitors. This once benevolent search engine swiftly evolved into a global psychological study of habitual human behaviour thanks to algorithms – software which detects patterns in the information we input. Ever more sophisticated fine-tuning soon allowed Google to understand its users better than we knew ourselves. This was mass surveillance on a truly incomprehensible scale – some might suggest a morally bankrupt misuse of ill-gotten omnipresence.

What certainly can’t be denied is that Google has been operating with the singular aim of pimping out users to anyone who will pay them. And, thanks to Google Wallet and Google Pay, they already know what we can afford to buy. Beleaguered Mark Zuckerberg must surely be wondering when Google’s day of reckoning will arrive.

The firm’s war chest currently stands at $101 billion, but that is a minor achievement when your grand vision is complete global dominance over the human race. When you own powerful satellites that can pinpoint any square metre on Earth in real-time, like Google does, you essentially become Godlike – an all-seeing eye in the sky with unlimited data on any subject you zoom in on. It also gives you an answer to any question, unlike the real God. It’s perhaps focusing a satellite camera on this sentence from over your shoulder right now. Click away, quick!

The company has also developed squadrons of robots like the terrifying Atlas, a 24st bipedal who looks like he just stepped out of the game Metal Gear Solid – the one where wealthy private armies keep the planet in a perpetual state of war for profit.

Google could certainly be perceived as its own borderless state, and what independent nation wouldn’t have its own defence system in case any old-school government decides it’s too powerful and tries to pull the plug?

DON’T BE EVIL, BE EVERYTHING TO EVERYONE

IN the beginning, Google only knew us by our internet searches. To comprehensively monetise its one billion users, the firm needed to understand their thinking processes – and also learn how to influence all decision-making.

To achieve this, Google set about love-bombing every aspect of our existences with new digital designs for life. Countless slick new platforms and addictive ecosystems were all created simply to discover what makes us tick.

Google is still in a state of colossal expansion, and retains its insatiable thirst for information - quenched by users willingly pouring their souls down its throat. It is not only the largest search engine in the world, but also owns the biggest video-streaming platform (YouTube), the world’s leading email service (Gmail), the most popular web browser (Chrome), provides the soundtrack for your life (Google Play) and also created the most widely-used mobile operating system (Android). It has microphones recording conversations in countless living rooms globally (Google Home), and hopes to become an energy company once it has enough customer data from its popular home thermostats (Google Nest).

Its controversial DeepMind project also leads the way with bleeding-edge artificial intelligence research. Self-driving cars are only one of many societal future shocks being prepared by its billion-dollar research and development labs. Google Glass, which crashed and burned over privacy and fashion fears, will have its day once more – in the form of contact lenses which project a sparkly augmented reality onto the world and record everything we experience in glorious ultra hi-def. One day, you will be able to hack into someone else’s eyes and watch them live their life. Shame most of it will probably be spent looking at a phone. Or in virtual reality. Truly meta.

Google’s targeted advertising is often viewed as the lesser of its perceived evils, but may prove to have the most societal impact of all. Anyone with enough money who aims to shape public opinion can now produce screeds of precisely targeted “fake news”, then analyse the algorithms and see which forms of propaganda were most effective. How quickly you scroll down a webpage and what you look at is timed to the millisecond. We’re fish in a barrel and escape is not an option – only different ways to drown. One recent study claimed phone users in Western countries touch their screens 2,600 times a day. I don’t think I’ve even touched myself that often.

It was perhaps indicative of Google’s ambitions that its “Don’t be evil” motto was quietly dropped during its parent firm’s rebranding to Alphabet Inc. “Do the right thing” is now the rather ambiguous company slogan – the right thing for whom, indeed? Surely not the data batteries powering the new information economy.

HOW THE TECH YOU OWN ACTUALLY OWNS YOU

IN East Berlin, the Stasi would ask schoolchildren to draw a distinctive clock which appeared on TV news bulletins. However, the official Soviet state broadcasts didn’t actually have a clock – just the illegal Western ones. A knock on the door of certain parents was soon forthcoming.

Nowadays, the Stasi would have no need to traipse around schools and prey on kids – they could chill at the office while hacking televisions to listen in to dissidents’ living room conversations. When Samsung recently released a new range of smart TVs, the firm actually took the step of warning customers not to discuss “sensitive” information in front of its microphone tool.

It advised buyers to “be aware that if your spoken words include personal or other sensitive information, that will be among the data captured and transmitted to a third party through your use of voice recognition”. Flabbers were gasted.

Perhaps we can learn from those in the know how to escape mass surveillance. Take a leaf out of Mark Zuckerberg’s book – the scruffy Facebook CEO was recently photographed in a typically manky, slept-in T-shirt with his laptop in the background. Thick sellotape had been plastered over its mic and camera. If a genius hacker and firewall mastermind like Zuck is a paranoid wreck, then it’s a warning to us all.

We’re now well aware of what Facebook knows about us, but what of other firms and the true intent of the shiny data transmitters they have the audacity to sell us? Apple products track your location and distance travelled, store all iMessages and keep every question you’ve ever asked Siri. Even the ones you’ve repeated in an American accent to be understood.

In a remarkable move, Microsoft is currently forcing users to accept its own moral etiquette by stopping them swearing. “Offensive” language on Xbox Live – surely not – Skype and even shared Word documents may get you into bother according to the firm’s new code of conduct. Perhaps Bill Gates’ s last-ditch attempt to get into Heaven.

In 2011, TomTom sold information from its satnav devices to police in the Netherlands, who then set up more effective speed traps. Poor show. In 2014, however, Uber executives beat that by spying on their ex-girlfriends – and Beyoncé – using their vehicles’ “God View” tool.

Even your own car is against you – if you’re unlucky enough to be able to afford a new one. Your exact location and speed is monitored, musical taste learned and shared. Even your eye movements, passengers’ weights and where you like to eat is known to manufacturers. They know you better than the twin you absorbed in the womb.

And remember, you’re never too young to have your soul stolen by Big Tech. Last year, consumer watchdog groups complained about the My Friend Cayla doll – subsequently banned in Germany – and the i-Que robot. When children ask either a question, everything is recorded and turned into a text – with all answers retrieved by our friends at Google. Sleep tight...