In an interview on The World Wide Web

So, let’s wind up with Google. We've talked about how liberating the Net can be in terms of Shirky’s book, Here Comes Everybody.

You recognise that title as a James Joyce quote by the way? Finnegans Wake.

Well it’s a lovely title. But Randall Stross’s Planet Google: One Company's Audacious Plan To Organize Everything We Know has a much more sinister title. Do you see this as the ultimate humanist Holy Grail – to collect all knowledge and to make it available for everybody simultaneously – or as a Faustian fantasy of total domination?

Well, Stross is no privacy nut. He embraces with the minimum of criticism the Utopian vision of Google, and you know, what he does in a really great, clear way, with lots of access and good writing, is to reveal the sheer scope of the Googlean vision of the world, whereby information would be catalogued and searchable. And that would include all kinds of information, including information that we don’t think of as the kind of thing that you could organise, including what streets look like and genetic information and stuff like that.

He’s not concerned that Google might use all that information in ways that are also cynical?

Well, he’s not that concerned. You know, people have called him naive. I don’t think he’s really all that naive. I’ve met the Google founders, I know what it’s like to talk to them. And, you know, you can look over the past years at how the US has woken up to ideas about data mining and intelligence gathering that are pretty scary, and then there’s been an appropriate counter-veiling movement away from them. I should probably be more frightened than I am. What I find fantastic about Google is that they’re the ones who are retro-fitting the Internet, basically. The Internet was never designed to get this big, it was never designed to carry the kinds of information that it does, on the scale that it does. It was a huge mass that had just sort of metastasised to grotesque proportions. And then Google came along and figured out a way of bringing order to what was an extremely disorderly creation. We’re not just talking about archiving the wilderness here, but organising it. The Web had essentially collapsed under its own weight. And at this point Google came along, because you just couldn’t find shit.