Google-gies: A New Literary Genre
January 19, 2024
This essay is the work of a dumb dinobaby. No smart software required.
I think graduate students in American literature have a new genre to analyze. The best way to define an innovation in literature is to take an example and do what soon-to-be-unemployed MA and PhD candidates do best: Examine an original text. I think one word used to describe this type of examination is deconstruction. Close enough for horseshoes.
These former high tech feudal barons lament parties designed to facilitate discussion of dissolution, devolution, and disintegration. Thanks, second tier MSFT Copilot Bing thing. Good enough again.
My name for this new branch of American writing is a combination of Google and elegy or Googlegy. I also considered Googletopsis in honor of William Cullen Bryant, but Googlegy is snappier in my opinion. The point is that the term applies to writing about the death of the Google myth.
Let’s turn to a recent example titled “Mourning Google.” The main idea is that the Google is dead or one facet of the estimable firm has passed into the Great Beyond. The writer is Tim Bray who was a Big Gun at OpenText and other firms before joining the Digital Camelot. He writes:
it really seems like the joy has well and truly departed the Googleplex.
Funereal? Yep. He continues:
And now, in Anno Domini 2024, Google has lost its edge in search. There are plenty of things it can’t find. There are compelling alternatives. To me this feels like a big inflection point, because around the stumbling feet of the Big Tech dinosaurs, the Web’s mammals, agile and flexible, still scurry. They exhibit creative energy and strongly-flavored voices, and those voices still sometimes find and reinforce each other without being sock puppets of shareholder-value-focused private empires.
I like the metaphors and the lingo. (Subsequent sections of the essay use vulgar language. Some of the author’s words appear on Google list of forbidden words, so I won’t repeat them. This is a blog, not English 602, Googlegy: Meaning and Social Impact.
The wrap up of the essay reveals some of the attitude of a Xoogler or former Googler presents this wonderful blend of nostalgia, greed, and personal emotion:
It was ethereal — OK, pretentious — almost beyond belief. Almost entirely vegetarian, rare plants hand-gathered by Zen monks and assembled into jewel-like little platelets-full that probably strengthened eleven different biochemical subsystems just by existing. And the desserts were beyond divine. Admittedly, sometimes when I left, my Norwegian-farmer metabolism grumbled a bit about not having had any proper food, but still. It was wonderful. It was absurd. And I got a $90K bonus that year because Google+ hit its numbers. It’s over, I think. It’s OK to miss it.
Why are Googlegies appearing? I have a theory, and if I were teaching graduate students, I would direct those eager minds toward a research topic in this untrodden intellectual space.
Let me share several observations:
- Using Swisscows.com or another reasonably useful Web search engine, one can locate other articles about the mythical death of the Google
- Medium and Substack harbor essays in this genre
- Conferences featuring speakers who were Googlers provide an opportunity for first-hand data collection
- Apply for a job and learn up close and personal how money assuages one’s conscience, emotions, and ethical whimpers.
I have a different viewpoint. The Google is busy redesigning the Web to maintain its grip on revenue from advertisers. Googley technology will, its senior managers hope, will blunt the rapacious outfits which are equally inspired by the spirit of Andrew Carnegie, Cornelius Vanderbilt, and John D. Rockefeller.
Welcome the birth of a new genre — Google-gies. Refreshing if too late.
Stephen E Arnold, January 19, 2024
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