Wired Writer Imagines Google Island

theodp writes "The last thing Wired's Mat Honan remembered before awaking on the self-driving boat that dropped him on the island was sitting through a four-hour Google I/O keynote in Moscone Center and hearing Google CEO Larry Page promote a vision of a utopia where society could be free to innovate and experiment, unencumbered by government regulations or social norms. 'Welcome to Google Island,' a naked-save-for-a-pair-of-eyeglasses Larry Page tells Honan. 'As soon as you hit Google's territorial waters, you came under our jurisdiction, our terms of service. Our laws — or lack thereof — apply here. By boarding our self-driving boat you granted us the right to all feedback you provide during your journey. This includes the chemical composition of your sweat. Remember when I said at I/O that maybe we should set aside some small part of the world where people could experiment freely and examine the effects? I wasn't speaking theoretically. This place exists. We built it.'"

I am Andrew Ryan...

[Anonymous Coward]

...and I'm here to ask you a question. Is a man not entitled to the sweat of his brow? 'No!' says the man in Washington, 'It belongs to the poor.' 'No!' says the man in the Vatican, 'It belongs to God.' 'No!' says the man in Moscow, 'It belongs to everyone.' I rejected those answers; instead, I chose something different. I chose the impossible. I chose... Rapture, a city where the artist would not fear the censor, where the scientist would not be bound by petty morality, Where the great would not be constrained by the small!

And with the sweat of your brow, Rapture can become your city as well...

Re:And of course Apple has to have their version

[Nerdfest]

As of Windows 8, yes. Guess who made it palatable.

Techno-homoerotic fantasy

[Anonymous Coward]

Congratulations (?) to Wired's Mat Honan for inventing a subgenre that nobody wants.

Re:You KNOW I'm right....

[Intrepid imaginaut]

How you equate the human need to explore with this self indulgent shite is beyond me. Google is a marketing company, end of. That they've managed to make the "don't be evil" tag stick in the face of their persistent attempts to violate every human convention about privacy in the name of gross lucre merely means they are a good marketing company.

Hopefully it will be forgotten before too long.

Re:Utopian playland

[BasilBrush]

What people invariably want is a state which has rules enforcing human rights, and little else.

That's not what most people want at all. Most people want roads, education, defense, a framework for business, etc. etc.

It's what Libertarians say they want. Though each wants only the human rights that happen to serve them individually.

We could do away with large swaths of the legal landscape and eliminate large parts of government, both local and federal, if we could just say "do anything you want, so long as you don't infringe on the rights of others".

The problem is that huge amounts of what we do infringes on others rights. There's very often a balance between rights of one person and rights of another. That's why an awful lot of those laws were created in the first place.

Re:Utopian playland

[TapeCutter]

Many people on slashdot holding those kind of opinions self-label as libertarian, but you're correct in that it is not part of the libertarian "platform". However like "flower power" in the 60's, the libertarian movement tends to attract people under 25 who are well-meaning but very naive about the human condition. They tend to believe all people are basically decent people and will naturally "get along withe each other" if only government would stop doing "stuff". This is simply false, without larger societies humans will revert to their natural tribalism, the alpha male in each extend family will rise (sink?) to the status of warlord. What both groups are really asking for is a self governing society, what they fail to see is that we already have one. I'm not sure what it says about the US but both movements arose and are strongest in the US.

During the late 60's, early 70's the hippies leaving the city to join communes in the country was one of the largest, if not the largest, internal US mass migrations of all time. Most of the communes fell apart quickly, people simply walked/ran away when the alpha members of the group turned it into a personality cult and started using and abusing everyone else for pleasure and profit. Very few lasted more than 2yrs, about the time it takes to truly realize that living with other people, (even like minded people), entails copious amounts of compromise + confrontation (politics).

Simply put evolution has designed our minds to live in tribal societies numbering between 100-200, all other tribes (even tribes of chimps) were universally seen as sub-human, xenophobia is still alive and kicking today because in geological terms evolution is still just playing with the idea of civilization for primates.