May 23rd, 2007
Does Eric Schmidt want to sniff the armpits of my mind?
So Eric Schmidt, the Chauncey Gardiner of Silicon Valley, is at it again. This time, the wise old fool wants to organize my daily life. The Google CEO (Chief Eccentric Officer) confessed to the Financial Times today:
“The goal is to enable Google users to be able to ask the question such as ‘What shall I do tomorrow?’ and ‘What job shall I take?’ ”
Does Eric want his algorithm to sniff the armpits of my mind? Does he seek to read me like a book so that he can organize not only my daily life, but my work life, my second life, my unconscious life and my erotic life? Is Eric so lonely, so desperate for intimacy that he wants to know me better than myself? Yes. Google’s Chief Eccentric Officer wants to be my shrink, my lover, my alter-ego, my subconscious, my pre-conscious. Eric wants to be me; or, more accurately, he wants to know me better than I know myself.
Oh Eric, stop sniggering into your algorithm. This is a serious matter. I thought you were a businessman rather than a looney. How can you possibly know what I want to do tomorrow when I don’t know that myself. And how can you know what job I want, when I’m perfectly happy as an unemployable layabout?
What’s going on here? Here we have a company with a market cap of north of $150 billion. It’s the hottest thing in technology. And the straight faced Chief Eccentric Officer, Silicon Valley’s very own Chauncey Gardiner, tells the leading global financial newspaper that he wants his algorithm to tell us what we should do with our lives.
Next thing you know, Eric will be telling me what book I want to write next. Let me guess. It’s a book about Eric and his algorithm. It will be entitled One Flew Over the Googleplex.
Andrew Keen is author of Cult of the Amateur. See his full profile and disclosure of his industry affiliations.
