FaithWorld

from Breakingviews:

Silicon Valley’s undeserved moral exceptionalism

Rob Cox

Mar 12, 2012 10:57 EDT

By Rob Cox

This essay appears in the March 19 edition of Newsweek. The author is a Reuters Breakingviews columnist. The opinions expressed are his own.

Silicon Valley likes to think of itself as morally exceptional. When Google went public in 2004, the Internet search company’s wunderkind founders, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, penned a letter to prospective shareholders that has become the Internet industry’s version of the Magna Carta. In it, they pledged that Google was “not a conventional company” but one focused on “making the world a better place.” Their manifesto followed a venerable tradition in Silicon Valley (meaning the swath of technology and Internet companies based in the cities and towns between San Francisco and San Jose). A decade earlier Apple co-founder Steve Jobs insisted that “being the richest man in the cemetery doesn’t matter to me … Going to bed at night saying we’ve done something wonderful … that’s what matters to me.”

The newest inductees to the Silicon Valley pantheon have continued to think very well of themselves and their motives. Mark Pincus, who introduced Farmville and Words With Friends to create pleasant online distractions, embraced comparable sentiments when taking Zynga public last year: “Games should do good. We want to help the world while doing our day jobs.” In the prospectus for what could be a record $10 billion initial public offering, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg promises that a similar philosophy will guide the social network. “Simply put: we don’t build services to make money; we make money to build better services. And we think this is a good way to build something. These days I think more and more people want to use services from companies that believe in something beyond simply maximizing profits.”

After the financial crisis and the great Wall Street swindles of the past few years, this all sounds refreshing. Toiling away in places with bucolic names like Sunnyvale and Mountain View, entrepreneurs create products intended to improve mankind and make the world a better place. The narrative offers an antidote to tales of bailed-out bankers collecting undeserved bonuses and job-crushing private-equity barons paying lower tax rates than their secretaries. But wishing to hold the moral high ground does not make it so - whether in industry, politics, or religion.

Though Silicon Valley’s newest billionaires may anoint themselves the saints of American capitalism, they’re beginning to resemble something else entirely: robber barons. Behind the hoodies and flip-flops lurk businesspeople as rapacious as the black-suited and top-hatted industrialists of the late 19th century. Like their predecessors in railroads, steel, banking, and oil a century ago, Silicon Valley’s new entrepreneurs are harnessing technology to make the world more efficient. But along the way, that process is bringing great economic and labor dislocation, as well as an unequal share of the spoils. Just last week, the Justice Department warned Apple that it planned to sue the company along with several U.S. publishers for colluding to raise the price of electronic books - monopolistic behavior that would have made John Rockefeller proud.

“During the second industrial revolution, the economy went through major transitions, led by 50 individuals who became incredibly wealthy, leading to huge unemployment,” says Joe Lonsdale, a 2003 graduate of the university founded by one of those tycoons, Leland Stanford. Indeed, Lonsdale is hoping to make his own fortune by “reinventing the infrastructure that powers global wealth” with his latest startup, Addepar. “Instead of the robber barons, today it is the technologists who are doing the destroying.”

Dead Sea scrolls going digital on Internet

Scholars and anyone with an Internet connection will be able to take a new look into the Biblical past through an online archive of high-resolution images of the 2,000-year-old Dead Sea Scrolls.

Israel Antiquities Authority (IAA), the custodian of the scrolls that shed light on the life of Jews and early Christians at the time of Jesus, said on Tuesday it was collaborating with Google’s research and development center in Israel to upload digitized images of the entire collection.

Advanced imaging technology will be installed in the IAA’s laboratories early next year and high-resolution images of each of the scrolls’ 30,000 fragments will be freely accessible on the Internet. The IAA conducted a pilot imaging project in 2008.

“The images will be equal in quality to the actual physical viewing of the scrolls, thus eliminating the need for re-exposure of the Scrolls and allowing their preservation for future generations,” the Authority said in a statement.

It said that the new technology would help to expose writing that has faded over the centuries and promote further research into one of the most important archaeological finds of the 20th century.

The scrolls, most of them on parchment, are the oldest copies of the Hebrew Bible and include secular text dating from the third century BC to the first century AD. For many years after Bedouin shepherds first came upon the scrolls in caves near the Dead Sea in 1947, only a small number of scholars were allowed to view the fragments.  But access has since been widened and they were published in their entirety nine years ago. A few large pieces of scroll are on permanent display at the Israel Museum in Jerusalem.

Lourdes-based “Catholic Google” may be rebaptised

Tom Heneghan

Jan 6, 2009 12:27 EST

Catholic Google has a catchy name, a funny logo and a location near one of the most Catholic places on Earth, the pilgrimage town of Lourdes in southwestern France. After only three weeks on the web, it has seen its user stats grow to about 16,000 visits a day. But the site that describes itself as“the best way for good Catholics to surf the web” may be in for a rebaptism. Its webmaster has asked Google if it has any objections to the name and is waiting for a reply.

While doing research for my blog post on Catholic Google on Sunday, I found it was based in a village outside of Lourdes. In a phone call today, webmaster Paul Mulhern told me he set up the website with standard Google filters last month as a service for Catholics who want to surf the web without all the objectionable material they usually come across there. The idea came from his wife, who runs a religious goods shop in Lourdes. They’re originally from Leeds in the UK.

He said most reaction to the site had been positive, although some comments accused him of trying to create a segregated corner of the web just for Catholics. “I can see where they’re coming from but I think they have the wrong point of view,” he said.

Mulhern said the safe search filter blocked most objectionable material but it still let some through, as readers who’ve tested it have found to their amusement: “We’re in the process of trying to eliminate as much of the unsavoury adverts as possible, but they have to be blocked by domain name, which is why it is taking some time.” Those ad links on the right side of a Google search can change according to where the reader is based, so this could be an enormous job. And the more ads he blocks, the less he potentially earns.

Some bloggers have asked if this site violates the Google trademark. “I’m in the process of speaking with them,” Mulhern said, adding he was dealing with Google in the United States. “I’ve asked whether they object to the name.” Just in case they do, he has been thinking about alternatives. “We’re thinking of changing the name of the website to something more catchy,” he said. “We might put out a poll.”

He may not have to rebaptise the site. The search engine’s office here in Paris told me they’re flexible about how Google is used on other websites as long as it clearly gets the credit for the search facility. The Google office in the United States dealing with his query would have to decide if he can keep the name and logo.

A Catholic Google? Are Muslim, Jewish or other Googles coming?

Tom Heneghan

Jan 3, 2009 11:06 EST

So now there’s Catholic Google*, a search engine that calls itself  “the best way for good Catholics to surf the web”, It claims that “it produces results from all over the internet with more weighting  given to Catholic websites and eliminates the vast majority of unsavoury content, such as pornography”.

When I heard this today, my first question was whether Google was getting into the religion business. Were there Muslim, Jewish, Hindu, Buddhist or other versions of the search engine out there as well? If not, would Google come up with them soon? Would it design filters that screen out cartoons of the Prophet Mohammad, pro-Palestinian websites or other items that followers of certain faiths might not want to see?

It turns out the answer is “No” to all above. Catholic Google has no connection to Google itself (here’s its disclaimer).  Somebody has reserved a URL for a Muslim Google but it has no content. There’s a Jewgle out there, but it’s more about jokes than real searches.

took a quick spin through Catholic Google and found that its Google SafeSearch filters were about as reliable as the bursting fishing nets in Luke’s Gospel: “It seems that when it comes to filtering topics beyond the standard “offensive” categories (swear words and sex) , CatholicGoogle only serves to make queries potentially more offensive. A search for “drunk” yields a video of “Drunk Catholic Kids”. Perhaps even more bizarre: a search for “sex” offers an article bashing the Church’s stance on sexuality (they may have included this in the results for a balanced alternative perspective, but I doubt it). It’s as if the site just appends the word “Catholic” to whatever you’re searching for and crosses its fingers.”

The disclaimer also says Catholic Google works closely with the real one to ensure the ads that pop up alongside its searches are not objectionable. But it does admit that some of them “may not be in line with Catholic doctrine and we do not endorse any of the results or adverts displayed on Catholic Google.” It wasn’t hard to find the out-of-line ads — it took almost no search time at all to find ads for gender selection, a gay dating service, surrogate mothers and divorce lawyers.

I think trying to use computer filters to create a religious search engine like this is a fool’s errand. Either it will be so restrictive that it doesn’t really search well or it will be so open that objectionable material gets through. Has anybody seen any site that gets the balance right?

(*hat tip: Patrick Heneghan)