The Politics of Systems

…but you can go ahead and waste everybody else – according to Google’s suggest function at least:

This is interesting because it is very obvious that Google erases certain queries in their suggest function (porn, etc.) and the idea that the Internet would “make” suggestible teenagers kill themselves is a recurring and media-fed scare that, as a consequence, is one of the few domains where censoring is near consensual. What I find interesting though is that all these other carnage scenarios do not get the DELETE FROM treatment, although one may argue that killing oneself is not more condemnable than killing somebody else.

But independently of this philosophical question (the only one worth pondering according to Camus, remember?), Google suggest is yet another way to query the closest thing to god there is: Google’s database; and the way certain queries are removed, most certainly by hand (BTW, “je veux me” on google.fr DOES suggest that you may want to end your life)…

Post filed under search engines.