"Nuke Me Gently." Anyone who's seen me naked, knows those words. Anyone who saw Super Bowl XXII. And everyone in the ABC TV broadcast booth. Especially Frank Gifford. I'm so sorry. I was young. It was just a dare.
Those three words are tattooed on my body. I don't know if you remember the opening scene from WarGames, (watch clip, FF to 3:53) but when you see the key turn to the word "GENTLY," that's partly where my tattoo comes from.
I guess in the scene it's supposed to be funny that in order to launch a nuclear strike to kill millions of people, you need to turn the key gently. Or it might not work. Darn.
So my feeling is, if you're going to blow the living crap out of me with a nuclear bomb, at least try to be nice about it. Maybe load the bomb with potpourri so the explosion will smell like violets.
But it's not just nuclear bombs I fear. There are groups that are so large and powerful that they dwarf us as if we're puny insects. Everything they do alters our lives. Like trying to observe a particle so small that the act of exposing light upon it alters its path. We are the tiny particles. And governments and some corporations are so enormous, that simply by attempting to interact with us, the alter our existence.
Like frying ants under a microscope, the simple act of such a huge organism as a government drawing its eye upon us, we, inevitably, are destroyed. An organization that big doesn't do it callously or maliciously, but simply because it doesn't know its own strength. We are tiny soft animals in Lennie's monstrous grip.
Which is how I feel about Google. Google indexes so much information that it's crossed into the realm of controlling it. The New York Times says, "Half the time, [Google] doesn't even realize how egregious its behavior has become..." [By JOE NOCERA Published: September 12, 2008]
But Google is simply a middleman, a broker between the customer and the data. On its own, Google is nothing. So how can it be evil? I guess it can't.
So, Google, I guess you're not evil. But you're becoming so big that simply existing crushes us. Please be gentle.
