Is Google Turning Us Into CyborgsRecently by James Altucher: If You Want People To Like You, Die
[Latest search on Google that took someone to my blog: "free children.sex.com"] I’m missing something from my life. My life feels empty. If I only had..If I could only get…If I only knew…and if I can’t get it all then… The human body and mind are insufficient, are too small, to satisfy that incompleteness. So we created a bigger brain, and we spread it throughout the world. Now it’s too big so we need to create a memory to retrieve neurons buried under trillions of “pages” so we call our new mechanical memory, “GOOGLE”. We only search when we are unsatisfied, incomplete, missing. We need one more piece of information, we need one more picture, one more fact that can fulfill us and make us more complete, smarter, better, ultra-human, cyber-human. I watch my stats for my blog religiously in realtime. I see what people search. In general, people are not happy. They want those missing holes filled. They want to be happy but they can only be if…. Just now, someone from Mountain View (ironically, home of Google, Inc.) using a Nokia phone, searched “free children.sex.com”. Why was he searching that at 6am, maybe stuck in traffic in the criss-crossing Silicon Valley freeways, on the way perhaps…to Google HQ? He ended up at this post: Perhaps the photo of a young Mitt Romney is enough to make the leap into the category searched. Or the fact that I recommend sex every day to newlyweds. But the cobwebs in our cyber memory twist it briefly into the wrong purpose. The visitor waited three seconds before he clicked away.
What else is missing in our lives? What else do we need to search for until life is complete? I will tell you because I’m watching the searches right now. It’s like watching an ongoing diary of the unfulfilled, the sad, the need to feel justified. The ongoing diary of what society needs this very second.
The next search I got: “Top ten reasons Not to apply to Harvard” , which took our friend to this post: 10 Reasons Parents Should Not Send Their Kids to College.
Let’s guess: his parents want him to apply to Harvard. But maybe he doesn’t want to go. Or he’s afraid he won’t get in. Or his girlfriend is going to Ohio State and he wants to go there with her. Or he doesn’t want to be a student at all. He wants to be an artist. The pressures of society weigh hard on the head of a 17 year old and he needs the help of the societal Borg consciousness of the Internet to help him justify not applying to Harvard (not just any school, but HARVARD). The very next search, one minute later: “Will the shareholders of Facebook make money?” which took another reader to this post: Jealousy perhaps? Please god, I’ve worked hard all my life and now some janitor at Facebook will make $200 million and will never have to work again, will find the monetary equivalent of enlightenment and freedom. I need to know, he searches, how much money they will make. What I am missing? What have I missed out on? More justifications for proving my life is unfulfilled and now where I wanted it to be. Google will help! Next search: “Porn Art” which takes the searcher to this post I wrote where I interviewed the porn star-turned-painter, Ben Banks. A few months ago Ben had to ask me to take the post down for awhile as it confused the potential buyers of his art but more recently he said I could return it to “Visible” status. Power to him. And power to someone who decided to breed “porn” and “art” in a search because art is often about the fulfillment of desire. And who wouldn’t want to watch the beautiful motion of two bodies having sex under the intellectual umbrella of “art”? May 17, 2012 Copyright © 2012 The Altucher Confidential
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