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 ============================================================ FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
