My speech at CXO Summit at TNW conference in pictures
Anders Behring Breivik
I’m slightly bemused by the storm that my CNN opinion piece on the Norwegian mass murderer Anders Behring Breivik has elicited. Some of the reaction on Twitter is unprintable, but there has been some fair criticism, including this interesting blog post arguing that World of Warcraft isn’t a violent game and that there’s no connection at all between Brievik’s affection for online gaming and his massacre of 77 innocent Norwegians last July.
Today’s revelations at Olso’s central court strengthen my argument about the nexus between his violence and video games. Breivik acknowledged in court that he “trained” for the attacks using the “holographic aiming device” on the video game Call of Duty: Modern Warfare. He said:
“It consists of many hundreds of different tasks and some of these tasks can be compared with an attack, for real. That’s why it’s used by many armies throughout the world. It’s very good for acquiring experience related to sights systems…. If you are familiar with a holographic sight, it’s built up in such a way that you could have given it to your grandmother and she would have been a super marksman. It’s designed to be used by anyone. In reality it requires very little training to use it in an optimal way. But of course it does help if you’ve practised using a simulator.”
I’m not arguing that video games like Call of Duty causes psychopaths like Breivik to commit mass murder. But only the most myopic apologist for electronic gaming could deny that these kind of violent games do play a role in the fantasies of lunatics like Breivik.
On Google
My CNN column last week focused on Google and its struggle for relevance in the Web 3.0 world of Facebook “likes”. I’m certainly not alone, of course, in predicting the long term crisis for Google. But even the last week, since my CNN piece appeared, there’s more and more evidence to support the argument that Google is increasingly vulnerable to the structural shifts in the digital economy.
Firstly, Google is becoming increasingly embroiled in the courts. Today, for example, a Federal appeals court revived Rosetta Stone’s trademark infringement lawsuit against Google. Then, of course, there’s the upcoming EU anti-trust decision which, even if it reaches some sort of settlement, will likely weaken Google’s hitherto semi-monopolistic control of the European search market.
Most of all, though, Google is behaving increasingly oddly. With the self-styled “grown-up”, Eric Schmidt, no longer in charge, the inmates are once again running the asylum over at the Googleplex. Take, for example, Sergei Brin’s peculiarly paranoid rant yesterday about Internet openness – an argument suggesting what is good for Google = good for web freedom. And then, of course, there is last week’s Google stock split which, as the Times’ Andrew Ross Sorkin notes, solidified “the founders’ control of the company by diminishing the future voting power of the shareholders”.
The issue isn’t really whether Google will be more or less evil in the future. It’s whether the dominant player in the Web 2.0 world will remain relevant in today’s social and mobile Web 3.0 world. With the kids back in charge, I’m not optimistic that Google can successfully reinvent itself.
Against Factuality
So, The New York Times tells us this morning, a start-up is gathering the facts – “all of them”. This start-up is Gilad Elbaz’s Factual which apparently wants to “collect every fact in the world.”
Elbaz is a fact ideologue. After his Israeli father told the young Elbaz about the Palestinian-Israeli conlict, the boy apparently replied “that the hatred would end if the two sides could just agree on the facts.”
Agree on the facts? That’s what history (public and private) is – a disagreement on the facts. If we were all agreements, then there would be no history, no complexity, no meaningful debate.
Elbaz is relentless about collecting facts. “Lately I’ve been thinking that we need to get more data,” he tells The Times. Apparently he wants us all to reveal all our genetic information, what we ate, when and when we exercised.
“I want to figure out a way to get people to leave their data to science,” Elbaz says.
But the problem with leaving our data to science is that we will reduce ourselves to data points. So I certainly won’t be leaving my data to science. And nor should you if, like me, you want to preserve your legacy.