September 19, 2012

Lemme see, The Borg collective Hive, Google Collective Hive.

The Borg: Assimilates entire races for their collective hive.

Google: Assimilate neighborhood leaders to schlep Google Fiber for free.

Fact: Whether your neighborhood achieved its sign-up goals or not, we’re all getting Google Fiber. A company called Utili-imap has had employees all over Northeast as of late, driving little white trucks and carrying clipboards while inspecting telephone poles for the installation of Google Fiber.

In short, the hype was just that, hype, highly orchestrated by the Google hive collective to stir emotion against the present Internet providers in the neighborhood. And oh how it worked. Neighborhood leaders literally fell at the feet of the Borg Google Queen for a chance at a free ice cream sammich, a rainbow colored rabbit sign for the yard and promised (not delivered yet) faster Internet. Neighborhood residents often – for free mind you – walked with Google worker drones, canvassing their “Borg-hood”, er, Fiberhood, searching for complacent and willing victims to sign up to be part of the Google hive collective. Google even has the city of Kansas City and Kansas City Public Schools carryin’ their water for ’em, all for free. What’s wrong with this picture?

Let’s do some history learnin’, shall we? Keep in mind that this is the same outfit that between 2007 and 2010, while mapping their Google Streets web feature, harvested “payload data” (IP addresses, email address, passwords and the like) as their little robot-drone camera cars cruised city streets. Anyone channeling George Orwell yet? For this little stunt, the FCC and the FTC began investigations of Google for allegedly breaching privacy laws in their quest to map the world one Google robot car at a time. Google initially denied harvesting the information, then recanted and said the gathered information was in fragments, then later said entire emails were collected. Following the denial of the denial, denying the initial denial, they released a highly censored “report” on their findings, blaming a rogue engineer. Earlier this year, the FCC fined Google $25,000, not for harvesting potentially private information, but for obstructing an ongoing FCC investigation.

This capitalistic news-pooch thinks that if General Motors or Goldman Sachs had come calling, the same folks who so enthusiastically carried Google’s water for free would have told ’em to go pound sand! When you stop to think about the way the whole thing has played out, it’s extremely creepy in a multi-billion dollar, privacy be damned, Orwellian kind of way. Who would have thought that being brainwashed by a corrugated plastic rainbow bunny sign and the prospect of a free ice cream sammich would hold such promise? Embrace the rainbow bunny – resistance is futile.