The Rise of the Benevolent Big Brother

For how long can a Big Brother stay benevolent? And if we are not currently seeing the rise of Big Brother government using internet technology, are we not still seeing the rise of a fundamental change to how citizen and government interact? These abstract and pretentious questions are brought to you due to recent collaboration between the Obama administration and Google in producing the recent live internet "Town Hall" meeting that invited questions from citizens the internet.

Obama’s Interactive Town Hall Meeting

This is a great article in that it gives a basic overview of the Town Hall, contains a link to the full transcript and contains video of the event. I found the last paragraph enlightening, "Mr. Obama is not the first president to engage in online chats with ordinary Americans; former presidents Bill Clinton and George W. Bush both answered questions over the Internet. But Mr. Obama is the first to do so in a live video format, streamed directly onto the White House Web site."

So was the internet showcase just a gimmick, something as easily done using television?

Google Moderator Gets White House Endorsement

No. The chosen format of having citizens contribute questions for the town hall that everyone with a whitehouse.gov account (so, interestingly, now 100,000 presumably new accounts exist with whitehouse.gov) could vote on could only be done on the internet. Or at least done very easily only on the internet.

Google is a for-profit corporation that is ubiquitous for the internet population as a search engine, email, maps and directions, and ever increasingly science fictiony things like being able to pinpoint you through your mobile device. It's my homepage, and I know it's the homepage for many others. The first I knew of the president's request for questions and votes was a message placed under the search box. I followed the link because...well, because it's interesting to see "The White House is requesting..." or however the request read.

So the government uses Google software to moderate the voting process for a town hall. I tried for a few minutes to find the old Dr. Who episode in which the Doctor and his companions come to this planet in which the population is asked to vote on issues many times a day. Every single citizen has a voting station near their TVs and they have to vote when alerted to do so. The government of this planet says it follows the will of the people and all measures are taken with the agreement of all to protect each other and have a benevolent government. Of course the government is actually the puppet of an invading alien. And so that is taking my point to the extreme. But how far away, really, is it for our nation to decide that Representative Government, at least with some government processes, is outdated? The easily swayed populist mob would then be in "control".

And let's look at what Google IS. At it's heart, it's a search engine. We are told "You can't Google everything!" but is that true? Yesterday a friend of mine told me that person X seemed to have been arrested last year for a crime. I immediately googled person X and found at the end of the first page the information that my friend was talking about. I saw that the arrest had been a warrant from Middletown. So I googled Middletown Ohio Court. That took me to the Municipal Court page for Middletown. Off this I found their "invisible web" info: a database of Court Records in which I could search on case number or name. I found person X and what he had been in trouble for.

The government has decided to use Google technology. I wonder how many FBI are now being recruited from the most info-gathering saavy individuals. And how many FBI are being trained to use it even better. Or perhaps also agencies with more ambiguous intent than the FBI are being trained. I'm sure this started happening before the Obama administration. But I'm also sure that this administration is the first that fully understands what the internet means for the government in a variety of ways.

More off-topic, and yet related: The Machine Stops by E.M. Forster (My firm belief that this is what the world is coming to because of the internet. Perhaps the evolution will not be so bleak, but it will have some common characteristics with how the people of this story live).