If Google is the Pope of the Internet, Then Who Are You & I?

I’m sorry that this week’s installment is a little bit later than usual, but I have been experiencing some technical difficulties. As far as I know, these technical difficulties have to do with censorship … insofar as someone or something seems to be trying to censor me. Yet I refuse to relinquish — much like Martin Luther did a half a millennium ago, so too I aim to persist in speaking my own truth … and if more or less powerful institutions try to silence me, well, I consider that to be their choice, not mine.

So here comes another episode of Socio BIZ uncensored (at least I hope so 😉 ).

Today’s metaphorical image goes back at least a decade (I think). Back then, there was another new & improved website online, named “Quora”. For a while, I enjoyed playing around with it, kicking the tires, pressing the buttons, bells and whistles, and checking it out to see what happens whenever I did. I even asked a question back then that went something like “Is ‘quora’ the plural of ‘quorum’?” … but the answers I got were generally too highfalutin for me.

Another question I asked went like this “How is trust in Google similar to or different than trusting the Pope?” (I haven’t visited or used Quora in ages, but I think the URL might be https://www.quora.com/How-is-trust-in-Google-similar-to-or-different-than-trusting-the-Pope ). In my opinion that question was more serious, but perhaps it was interpreted as less serious. My own favorite answer I considered to be simply funny, whether serious or not (I think it was something like “The Pope gives you free bread and wine, but Google doesn’t”).

I guess it should be quite clear that when I asked the question, I already interpreted Google to be “The Pope of The Internet” — and I still believe that to be true to this day.

Recently, I wrote to an acquaintance in an email exchange that I consider myself to be sort of the web 2.0 version of Martin Luther … and then I started wondering if that is the appropriate analogy or not. In this vein, I also considered: “well, then who is Gutenberg 2.0?”

Just this morning, as I was chatting with friends about the latest attempts to censor my ass (does anyone here get the pun / joke, since I consider myself to be similar to Martin Luther?), I came up with the following setup.

If Google is the (metaphorical) Pope of the Internet, then everything / everyone else falls into one of three (metaphorical) categories:

1. Martin Luther (protestant, reformer, revolutionary, etc.)
2. Johannes Gutenberg (scientist, technologist, entrepreneur, etc.)
3. suckers (bandwagon followers, mitläufer, opportunists, etc.)

Which category are you — or is there another category that might suit you better?

Maybe I ought to also consider categories like “capitalist”, “marxist”, “industrialist”, “slave”, etc. — but let’s put such questions off for a bit, or maybe even for a while.