Arlo Barnes wrote at 03/14/2013 10:30 PM:
Now, there are many things Google does that could be considered evil (or
at least heading that way; all that foofaraw with Verizon?), but not
providing service previously provided for free is not one of them. It is
merely annoying, or at worst (if all your workflow is locked into the
service) frustrating/infuriating.
Back in college, I used to distract myself from homework by reading this
http://www.press.uchicago.edu/ucp/journals/journal/et.html. I don't
know why. I must have gotten a good deal on the subscription.
It was like television, I guess. I only remember 1 article from the
whole stint, entitled something like On Killing and Letting Die. The
idea was to draw a moral distinction (or not) between the two actions.
After college, I ran across lots of busyness people who would claim that
not acting is a decision just as much as acting in one way or another.
My own conclusion was that killing someone and letting them die are
essentially the same thing, morally speaking. Nowadays, I may be
revising that, since I argued for pulling my dad from his machines and
as I approach the age where I may want to off myself rather than slowly
decay in bed.
My point, here, is that Google may well be committing the moral
equivalent of killing a project even though it seems like they're merely
not providing a service.
In any case, it was from this lack of a moral distinction between
killing and letting die that I drew my own private (and much criticized
by my friends) definition of evil - willful ignorance. I.e. only
those who are unwilling to empathize, if not directly experience the
effects of their actions could ever be called evil. That means
literally any act anyone might do, regardless of how atrocious or
pathological, could be non-evil as long as they work hard enough to
understand what their victims will(are) experience(ing).
Hence, Google could demonstrate that letting Google Reader die (by
removing its life support) is not evil by showing us that it has some
in-depth metrics for how it's absence will affect its users and the
society in which they're embedded.
--
== glen e. p. ropella
Laid out in amber baby
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