In the night from Friday to Saturday (Central European Time) Mistress MJ’s blog “The Infomaniac” vanished traceless from the web. Even her comments on other blogs were gone, as I later realized. As the Mistress later told us her complete google-account, g-mail-account inclusive, was gone or “temporarily not accessible”. There was no explanation from google.
This could be considered an accident, a computer glitch, a technical mistake, a unhappy coincidence.
This Sunday midday the blog “Escritoraypeligrosa” by Leni Qinan vanished, all her comments gone. For the details of the development see Leni’s site.
MJ is in Canada, Leni Qinan in Spain. This is seemingly no coincidence.
Leni Qinan wrote, among other things, erotic texts marked clearly on her site as works of fiction. MJ was not sparing or frugal (housewifey?) with the presentation of naked male flesh – mostly a bit wobbly. The Infomaniac is not to be considered a pornographic site, but a place for everyone to come by, have fun, play, wear masks and take them away, and where one should not take oneself too serious.
All that google seemingly did not understand. Obviously only photographs with naked skin and pertinent terms were indexed.
And then these online-personas were wiped out. Completely. Without notice. Comments they made on other blogs included.
One. The system applied is not clear or understandable. It is seemingly simply at random. So who’s next who has to go and vanishes from google’s internet? What criteria are applied?
Two. What indulges google itself doing here? This is plumpest censorship. Without any respect to contexts, reduced to what?
Three. That comments of deleted online-personas simply vanish – gone, never happened: Only the context of other people’s answers show that there has been a comment! – that is an unbelievably shamelss and impertinent violation of other people’s conversation, an intrusion into the communication of people. Goggle not only kills single blog personalities, but in erazing their comments they censor other people’s blogs too. That is a disturbing ingression into the relations people have established via blogs partly over years. This is not acceptable.
Four. The deleted blogs were three or more years online. They were not only connected with other blogs and integrated into a community. Most of all they were filled with content, self created subjects, topics – content: It took a lot of time, effort, thought and reflection to create this. And love.
Five. The deleted blogs were community building. There was exchange. Valuable are not only the posts, but the comments too: These are conversations that lead over the single blog to new relations – I think that is blogging about, eh? A more-dimensional kind of conversation … just kicked in the bin!
Six. Google shows itself as an undemocratic entity abusing its power, usurping a role as a moral instance or authority, which can delete personalities now and over time via the comments: That’s damnatio memoriae, something Stalin did, and other dictators.
Connecting google’s streeview infringements (the illegal collecting and recording of data), the filtering of search results – what is nothing else but censoring – and the omnipresence of google in the web by all sorts of services with the bold taken- for-grantedness google simply does things – f.e. digitalizing whole libraries, measuring the world by satelites, monopolizing picture search, ration and hand-out of news, cartellizing with Amazon, ebay and facebook – to name just a few things – summarizing all this, I come to the conclusion that this leads into a digital absolutism with a volume of power in real life that is not acceptable.
I want people to know about this and think about it. I do not want google to be conceded power.
My consequence is to move this blog and my business-blog to wordpress, the community-based open source blog plattform. I do not want to use google-services any more, privately or business related, be it the search or the maps or something else. I will delete my google account when the blog is moved. For everything else there are enough other vendors or suppliers on the web, who bring the same – or better – service as google.
I wish many people would do this too and thus take away the monopolizing power from google and contain its abuse of power.
63 mago 