Despite Google’s extraordinary usefulness; its friendly, intuitive design; and the fact that its slogan is “Don’t Be Evil”—which its founders love to reiterate as often as possible during interviews—the company’s central drive, as a publicly-traded corporation, is, and must be, profit.8 And it is one of the fundamental philosophical errors of our era—awash as it is with neoliberal influence and the language of economics—to conflate profit with value, or, even worse, to moralize profit, to insist the pursuit of it is a productive force that, if unadulterated, will necessarily be “not evil.” The drive for profit is no doubt a productive force, but how and what it produces is too seldom the subject of inquiry. Google may clean up well, but, largely out of the public eye, it still makes time to sully itself in the name of the almighty dollar.
Read the essay at wagsrevue.com