From [William Gibson’s Op-Ed Contributor article – Google’s Earth – NYTimes.com](http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/01/opinion/01gibson.html?_r=2):
> Google is not ours. Which feels confusing, because we are its unpaid content-providers, in one way or another. We generate product for Google, our every search a minuscule contribution. Google is made of us, a sort of coral reef of human minds and their products. And still we balk at Mr. Schmidt’s claim that we want Google to tell us what to do next. Is he saying that when we search for dinner recommendations, Google might recommend a movie instead? If our genie recommended the movie, I imagine we’d go, intrigued. If Google did that, I imagine, we’d bridle, then begin our next search.
and
> Jeremy Bentham’s Panopticon prison design is a perennial metaphor in discussions of digital surveillance and data mining, but it doesn’t really suit an entity like Google. Bentham’s all-seeing eye looks down from a central viewpoint, the gaze of a Victorian warder. In Google, we are at once the surveilled and the individual retinal cells of the surveillant, however many millions of us, constantly if unconsciously participatory. We are part of a post-geographical, post-national super-state, one that handily says no to China. Or yes, depending on profit considerations and strategy. But we do not participate in Google on that level. **We’re citizens, but without rights.**
Read [the whole article](http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/01/opinion/01gibson.html?_r=2). A fascinating take on Google and cyberspace, from the guy that invented the word cyberspace.
also [via Brian Alexander’s Infocult](http://infocult.typepad.com/infocult/2010/09/kafka-glands-and-human-coral-reefs.html)