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On any given day, Google can make your life run quite smoothly. It's not just the fast and accurate search engine that made the company famous, but all the widgets, large and small, churning out of the internet imagination machine. Free email. Free stock market information. Free phone service. Free monitoring of the energy grid and your personal energy consumption. The largest collection of digitized books on the planet. The most important map in the world.
Google makes your life run smoothly, but Google doesn't run your life. Yet.
A little more than a month ago, Google announced on its official blog the release of Google Apps for Governments, a collection of cloud-based messaging and document collaboration tools for local, state and federal governments. Already adopted by the District of Columbia, the City of Los Angeles, the City of Orlando, New Mexico's Attorney General and the U.S. Department of Energy's Berkeley Lab, the FISMA-certified service is proving efficient, secure, and, well, dirt cheap. It's now very possible that every government document will be hosted on Google's servers in the future.
Wait, stop. I know where you think I'm going with this, so I should clarify something. Yes, I grew up in Roswell, New Mexico, and yes, I love conspiracy theory gossip just as much as anyone else. But, despite some indications that they may be just as profit-hungry and conniving as any other company, I still like to believe that Google is a benevolent entity. I am far from an anarchist and this is not a warning message—I don't think Google is staging a coup, nor do I dream of CEO Eric Schmidt in brightly-colored fatigues storming the White House. That's not the point here.
Here's the real point, by way of a little metaphor: Imagine planning a night out with your friends. Two friends—no problem. Four friends—coordinating is a little more complicated, but reasonable. Eight friends? If someone doesn't step up and take charge, you'll all be sitting at home alone tonight.
That eighth friend that steps up is the government. Government is an organizing principle for society, that which makes it possible for all of us to live in such close proximity to one another, to build an infrastructure that benefits everyone and distributes the cost as evenly as possible, to allow the farmer and the artist and the soldier to coexist in the same space.
Who gets to be the government? The eighth friend, the one who proves by her character or track record to be the most capable of making a decision for the group that pleases the majority, or it's the friend who can get the job done fastest, cheapest, or most effectively.
But government is also the price of living together. The eighth friend holds significantly more power than the rest of us lazy schlubs. The diminished relative value of each democratic voice created by that imbalance of power has been considered acceptable losses until now.
In the same manner that companies like Halliburton and Blackwater are (functionally) replacing the military, FedEx and UPS are replacing the U.S. Postal Service, and countless other NGOs are replacing tiny threads of the tapestry that is goverment, Google is one of several companies poised to take the lead role of the eighth friend—or eliminate the need for an eighth friend at all.
If Google and hundreds of other organizations prove that the cost of governance can be significantly lower, that the eighth friend factor is no longer necessary to assemble ourselves, make decisions, and manage our daily lives, we now have to ask ourselves a big question: do we need the government anymore?
How would it affect each of us as individuals—our national identities, our skills of self efficacy, our interpersonal relationships—if we were entirely self-governed, with technology providing the infrastructure to keep us all in one piece? Would we be different than we are now?
I'd love to hear what you think. Just do me a favor: Don't search Google for your answer. ;-)
Find me on Twitter: @rondoylewrites
Check out my Blog Salad, my humor blog about design, technology and general geekiness: BlogSaladBlog.com
Copyright Ron S. Doyle.
