Eric Schmidt said it clearly enough from the beginning: Google+ was never really about social networking; it’s a data-mining project. The goal was to break the back of Facebook’s monopoly on our personal information — to coax us into telling Google whom we’re friends with, what we like, how we spend our free time — so that Google could do what it always does: improve its search product and improve its ads product, the company’s core businesses. From a business perspective, search and ads are almost all that matter, and Google believes (rightly, probably) that adding social data will improve them both.

One reasonable question in response to this might be: Is creating a trojan horse Facebook clone like Google+, in order to harvest our personal data, so that Google can improve its search product by displaying photos of our friends’ dogs, a desperately simple-minded plan that’s bound to fail? Well, probably yes.

But there’s another, harder question roiling around the internet: Is doing this “anti-competitive behavior”? M.G. Siegler writes:

This is the type of case that Senators die for. Google wrapped it in a bow and placed it in one of their laps.

Most of the broader antitrust concerns against Google are bullshit in my opinion. You can argue that they have a monopoly on search, but it’s a natural one. They’ve earned it. They’re simply better at search than their competitors. This has always been true. It remains true.

But when they use that natural monopoly to start pushing into other verticals, things get gray. Travel, restaurant reviews, etc, etc. We see more of it each year.

But this, at first glance, seems decidedly worse. Google is using Search to propel their social network. They might say it’s “not a social network, it’s a part of Google”, but no one is going to buy that. They were late to the game in social and this is the best catchup strategy ever.

In the words of HBS Professor Ben Edelman, Google is engaging in “classic ‘tying’ behavior.” They’re using their natural monopoly on search to give unearned attention to their social networking site. This isn’t the first time Google’s done this either, according to Edelman.

By all indications, free traffic from Google Search has played a valuable role in launching many Google businesses. For example, Google Maps usage remained sluggish until Google started to present inline Google Maps directly within Search Results, a practice that began in earnest in 2007. As Consumer Watchdog’s 2010 “Traffic Report” shows, this change precipitated a sharp increase in Google Maps’ market share: Traffic to Google Maps tripled while traffic to competing map sites fell by half.

I can’t know what’s in Google’s heart of hearts, of course. And needless to say, I’m no expert on antitrust laws. But Edelman’s analysis is predicated on a conception of Google’s strategy that seems utterly wrong.

It’s simply not believable that Google would hamper their core search product in order to hand out a subsidy to their fledgling maps product. What’s the end game there? They were, in all likelihood, doing the reverse of this — using maps to help search. Indeed, you could retell the story of Google’s entire product line — the story of everything they’ve done for the past decade, almost — as the project of amplifying the power of search. Its books indexing efforts, its blogs search, its local reviews site Places, its news aggregator and now, its social data: who cares if these sundry properties succeed as stand-alone apps? Google’s goal isn’t to run an apps empire; it’s goal is to organize all the world’s knowledge. The play is for data, not impressions.

Figuring out how to control data that affects search quality is strategy 101 for Google. If they didn’t control the data themselves, they’d be dependent on the whims of the market to call it forth and then on the whims of business negotiations to access it. In the case of social data, where there is plenty of it out there already, it was this latter step that broke down. Twitter simply chose to prevent Google from displaying their data. So Google, as a hedge against precisely this outcome, built an alternative. They called it Google+. Now they display that on search instead.

What’s anti-competitive about that?*

I full-heartedly agree with Matt Yglesias’s claim that progressives should dwell less on “taxing the winners in our economy and transferring their money to the losers,” and more on programs designed to make our markets more fair. The goal of the left is to enable ordinary people to live free and creative lives. Tax and transfer is — and historically, always has been — a poor substitute for this more radical change. In a progressive agenda with the goal of making our society more susceptible to restructuring by its citizens, the government’s key role shifts from “taxing-and-transfering” to disentrenching abusive power and making sure our institutions are open to participation by the public they affect. In the context of free markets, that means a commitment to “busting trusts” and keeping competition dynamic.

But the silly arguments that Google’s fledgling attempts to integrate social data into its search results represents an offense punishable under anti-trust law is a good rebuke to the TR-style progressive: in short, sometimes you just don’t know what you’re talking about. The danger of intervention is ignorance.

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*If anything, as Dave Winer argues, Google’s failure to implement its social data alternative correctly is breaking their monopoly power, rather than entrenching it.

America’s penchant for baseball stories has always seemed odd to me. When John Roberts compares judges to “umpires,” for example, on the opening day of his confirmation hearing, and then proceeds to defend judicial restraint on the grounds that “nobody ever went to a ball game to see the umpire,” I stare blankly. Can’t we do better? I wonder. Must we Americans reduce weighty judicio-moral issues to the language of balls and sticks?

This garden variety sense of alienation — from one’s own countrymen, from one’s own damn language — is partly why I loved Harbach’s novel so much: his book is an act of transposition; he takes the democratic language of baseball and places it into that undemocratic world of “contemporary fiction,” where authors trained at elite universities (like Harbach) write for readers trained at the very same places (like me). Reading The Art of Fielding is thus like looking across America, and into a mirror, at once.

The story centers on a shy and preternaturally graceful shortstop named Henry Skrimshamer, who was recruited to play baseball at Westish College, a “slightly decrepit liberal arts school on the western shore of Lake Michigan.” Henry’s performance is exceptional. He ties the all-time record for errorless games in a college career, and then – and of course there’s an “and then” – with one wildly errant throw, he hits and nearly kills a teammate, and suddenly finds that his marvelously unselfconscious athletic gifts have abandoned him. He can’t seem to throw straight again.

Henry’s trauma has something to do with what Harbach likes to call “the paradox of baseball.” “You loved it,” he writes, “because you considered it an art: an apparently pointless affair, undertaken by people with a special aptitude, which sidestepped attempts to paraphrase its value yet somehow seemed to communicate something true or even crucial about The Human Condition.” And yet, if baseball is an art, Harbach says, to succeed at it “you had to become a machine.” Baseball’s beauty is born from repetition, from the monotonous shaving off of millimeters and millisecond, from the unfreedom of our search for perfection — baseball is an odd art indeed.

In the heat of Henry’s own “dark night of the soul,” he realizes the problem. “All he’d ever wanted was for nothing to ever change,” he thinks to himself. “Or for things to change only in the right ways, improving little by little, day by day, forever…” The disease afflicting Henry is called “growing up.” After Westish College, that beautiful promise of baseball – the promise that we might become perfect if only we practice hard enough – is set ablaze by the chaos of life.

Thus my manic night of reading. The problem of baseball is the problem of Harvard: despite being hard, it actually makes success too easy. We’re told where to throw the ball; told that avoiding errors is enough; told that everyone will cheer for us as we run around the bases. The hard part about life, as Henry discovers, is that none of this is actually true.

So my own baseball analogy would go like this: baseball isn’t life, and that’s exactly why it matters.

Photo Credit: cmduke, Flickr

I was intrigued. For the question bearing down on me (on all of us), is why, one week later, is Occupy Harvard so unpopular? Why has it failed to excite our sympathy?

I’m skeptical of the typical tropes. Is Occupy Harvard unpopular simply because the administration locked the gates? Is it really because we’re un-self-conscious about our privilege? The problem demands an explanation, for Occupy is a broadly popular movement and Harvard is a highly progressive university. What’s gone awry?

My friend’s answer begins by noting that there are roughly two different cases for setting up tents in Harvard Yard: either to express our community’s support for the national Occupy Movement, which is righteous and in need of all the help it can get; or otherwise, to express our community’s disgust at Harvard itself, our administration and all of its inadequacies. Both cases are cogent, but they diverge rather sharply.

If Occupy Harvard had chosen the first path, instead of the second – if they had designed their mini-“tent city” as a platform for exploring progressive alternatives for America; for dreaming up institutional change and excogitating on the future of capitalism; and for attracting young progressives to the Cause – “I’d be living in a tent right now,” my friend remarked. “I agree,” I said. That would be extraordinary.

But of course, Occupy Harvard didn’t choose that path. They opted instead to fight against the Harvard community (its administration; those students getting finance jobs) on behalf of local concerns (union negotiations; legacy admissions; and the transparency of the endowment management company), rather than doing the opposite — that is, rather than mobilizing our community on behalf national change.

In an almost-cynical way, the Harvard occupiers have “occupied” the Occupy brand. They’ve reduced a rich national movement, likened by some to the first rumblings of a “progressive era for our time,” into a special interest campaign for a few.

Are Harvard unions important? Yes. Is legacy admissions just? Probably not. But during this worldwide “crisis of capitalist democracy,” are workers with unionized jobs, who bring in salaries far above market rate (NB: as Marina Bolotnikova has pointed out in The Crimson, “the salary of every Harvard service worker is greater than or equal to the US median household income.”), or talented high school students whose spots at Harvard were lost because of legacy admissions, rightly the centerpieces of our activist consciences? Setting the smallness of their campaign against the largeness of our problems has an almost dizzying effect.

To ask another question: Is an insistence on the moral purity of our home, even at the costs of ignoring greater injustice, an indicator of the same sort of privilege that the occupiers officially detest? Or more simply: Can any institution be perfect, when so many are patently cruel?

Dylan Matthews has suggested that Harvard deserves our ire because it “ushers its students into jobs as socially respectable gamblers at banks and hedge funds to line its own endowment” and because it “helps perpetuate a ‘merit’-based caste system that is morally beyond defense.” These are interesting ideas — that Harvard selects and trains bankers to fill up its own coffers; or that the meritocracy is simply discrimination by another name. But soft conspiracy theory, and a Rawlsian argument about the giftedness of merit, are lonely ice floes on which to build a social movement.

Hence the unpopularity. It’s not that Occupy Harvard is wrong, per se; it’s that the fight they chose to pick is significantly harder to justify, and ultimately much less important, than the fight they chose to ignore – the fight for progressive change writ large. They’ve taken an extremely easy case – that America needs help! – and made it into a harder and less popular one – that Harvard is the problem, or synecdoche for the problem, rather than the solution. In doing this, they’ve alienated so many young progressives who could have otherwise been recruited to the cause.

We should be careful. The left has a history of self-immolation. We’re killed by our own conceits: our belief that “perfect justice” (in Amartya Sen’s phrase) is more important than measurable steps to remediate cruelty and immiseration where they’re most obviously manifest; our belief that critiquing power, all power, is more important than soliciting power’s support on behalf of positive ends.

We can do better than this. The Harvard student body knows it, and I hope Occupy Harvard does too. Thankfully, the alternative path is clear enough. My suggestion: see above.

Nietzsche once said that all “great philosophy” takes the form of “involuntary and unconscious autobiography.” Philosophers try to give us Truth, he said, but in the process, they betray their vantage points, their specifics fears, their peculiar hopes. “To understand how the abstrusest metaphysical assertions of a philosopher have been arrived at,” Nietzsche continues, “first ask oneself: ‘What morality do they aim at?”

Watch five minutes of CNN’s coverage of the Occupy Wall Street movement, and you might conclude the same of political punditry. No matter how rigorous their reporting, or esoteric their subject, journalists are always, in the end, writing about themselves.

Thus it shouldn’t surprise us that mainstream television reporters ridicule the Occupy movement. These journalists are trained to document Power—the President, Kim Kardashian, and so on. They lack the intellectual bearings to understand a leaderless movement, one that (we shouldn’t forget) aims its moral ire directly at the world of privilege they depend on for a living.

But make no mistake, we student journalists have our biases too. We’re graduating soon. Among other epistemological constraints, we have to find jobs. The arc of American history, our nation’s present “employment crisis,” and the first semester of our senior year, all mix into one. How could we not believe, at least a little bit, that our own futures are bound up in the fate of a movement that is advocating for a more inclusive, 21^st century economy? How could we not see our own faces somewhere in the crowds at Zuccotti Park?

This might sound odd coming from a Harvard student, whose school has done more than basically any other to train the ranks of the 1%. But if you think that students and “the 99%” are in different boats – that this is about “the privileged” versus “the unfortunate” – then you don’t get it.

Our problem, in a word, is not weakness, but strength. “The 99%” is just too strong – too educated, too individuated, too creative – to fit into an industrial age economic system that was set up over one hundred years ago, in order to make production and consumption as “mass” as possible.

Henry Ford’s factory wasn’t just about manufacturing cars quickly. It was also about making our jobs as menial and standardized as possible, so that anyone could duplicate our labor, and corporations could grow. And so they did, at tremendous costs. If the demise of this system is imminent, it is being wrought, in a way, by its own success. Automation renders humans so replaceable that we soon won’t be needed at all. As one recent book concludes: “Many workers, in short, are losing the race against the machine.”

This is either catastrophe (an “unemployment crisis”) or opportunity. For by destroying labor, technology makes us stronger. Sure, it renders our crappy factory jobs obsolete, but who wanted them anyways? What we gain is so much greater: the capacity to create, to hack together organizations, and to do all the things of starting a business (from coordinating work, to building skills, to marketing and selling) are more widely distributed today than ever before in our history. In this post-Industrial world, Labor dies as everyone becomes Capital.

And therein is the promise of our time. If we want an economy that’s more awesome – that’s more humane, more local, more inclusive, more meaningful – we can build it ourselves. Indeed, I see no other option.

When Obama clinched the Democratic nomination, in June of 2008, The New York Times published an unusually good political profile of the man and his moment. Instead of simply profiling Obama’s life, the essay’s author profiled Obama’s opinion on the nature of political profiles. It was a pomo backflip, and it actually worked. For this was the height of “Obamania,” and the phenomenon of people writing about Obama (and talking about Obama and thinking about Obama) was absolutely central to the story that had to be written about Obama.

Today, the soaring “hope” of 2008, and all that talk about “change you can believe in,” has largely been forgotten – perverted into a sort of gnarled despair – but our obsession with the man remains. Reading them now, Obama’s remarks on his own fame come off as prescient. “I find these essays more revealing about the author than about me,” he says, presumably with a grin, as he looks one such author in the eyes. “I am like a Rorschach test. Even if people find me disappointing ultimately, they might gain something.”

What a perfect summation of his presidency! Obama has disappointed everyone, and through our varied disappointments, we’ve gained something. We’ve learned about our fears: our fears of “government takeover,” of corporate capture, and of Kenyan princes. And we’ve learned about our hopes: our hope for a “simpler time,” for a “less partisan” nation, and for a more creative leader. But more than anything, it seems to me, our experience of disappointment with Obama has taught us (or should have taught us) how fundamentally dependent we are on the experience of disappointment with Obama to learn about ourselves. It’s a meta lesson, but it’s true. We’ve discovered in these past three years that we’re totally, eyes-glued-to-the-TV, ass-plopped-on-the-shrink’s-couch obsessed with our president – even those who are disappointed with him, indeed, especially those who are disappointed with him.

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Obsessively hating/loving your president is a fine American tradition. But it’s also a telling admission: when you criticize Obama, you’re admitting his power to solve our collective problems, and denying your own. He can save us; we cannot. But the truth is often the opposite. Our president is one man in one branch of one layer of government, which is itself just one system sitting alongside others. And we, by contrast, are the creators of the society in which we are situated, and beneficiaries – here in America, and especially today – of all the freedoms and material capabilities we’d need to take on the task of building solutions to the problems we encounter, whether it’s starting businesses that create jobs or cleaning our parks that create community. William James once wrote that, “The nation blest above all nations is she in whom the civic genius of the people does the saving day by day, by acts without external picturesqueness.” In a democracy, citizens don’t wait to be saved by others; they do the saving themselves, “day by day.”

That our presidential system and our participatory democracy are opposed should not surprise us. Two hundred and thirty five years ago, Tom Paine lambasted the King of England for calling himself “father of his people.” Today, in a delicious reversal, we have Maureen Dowd calling on Obama to take up the role that George III abandoned, to be “the strong father” “who reassures and instructs the public,” and who acts as a “prism in moments of fear and pride, reflecting what Americans feel.” Like any good Rorschach test, Obama has revealed to us a great subconscious desire: we want our president to be King.

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Whether Obama should be King of America — let’s take that question off the table. (But remember, if Obama were King, we’d have cap-and-trade legislation and more fiscal stimulus. Do the liberal advocates for these policies harbor fantasies of regal power? Do the conservatives who fault Obama for pursuing them believe he already has it?)

The dangers of the modern, King-like president – or, as the political scientists call it, our contemporary “populist presidency” – are far less hypothetical. Indeed, one single fact is enough to make the case against our present system: in the year 2012, there’s a small but very real chance that Michele Bachmann will be become President of the United States of America. Think about this for a moment – it should terrify you. And yet, this isn’t about Bachmann at all. For if not her this time, then it’s someone like her – some other populist hack who captures our collective imagination (and let’s be clear, we have no dearth of such people) – at the next election cycle, or the one after that.

The symbolic power we’ve vested in the presidency has made it more vulnerable to capture by extremists today than perhaps at any point in our nation’s history. And at the same time, and for the same reason, the role is more important than ever before, raising the stakes when the bet is most risky. The threat of total political catastrophe – of the proverbial Bachmann becoming president – is baked into the system itself.

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It was never supposed to be this way. The Framers imagined that the president would play a modest role in the affairs of the country. Even the strongest advocate for executive strength, Alexander Hamilton, says in Federalist No. 69 that the president must have “no particle of spiritual jurisdiction, with no task but the “energetic execution” of Congress’s laws. Indeed, it’s not clear whether he was even supposed to be popular. In the Federalist No. 1, Madison expresses his deep concern, trenchant among all the founders, about the “men who have overturned the liberties of republics” by “paying obsequious court to the people, commencing demagogues and ending tyrants.” This, after all, is why we have the Electoral College, so that the president would transcend the whims of the public mood, rather than embody them. We regard the Electoral College as a byzantine holdover, but it’s important to remember its original function – it was to prevent people like Bachmann from becoming president.

Much has changed. As Yale law professor Bruce Ackerman has pointed out, in his book The Fall of the American Republic, nearly every reform since the Constitutional Convention has made the institution of the presidency more populist in nature. To list a few important ones along the way: in the 1790s, political parties were formed; in the 1880s, nation-wide campaigning began; in 1933, FDR’s fireside chats brought the president into the average American’s living room; the popular primary was formally established in 1968; and in 2004, in large part because of Howard Dean, online fundraising and internet messaging made it easier than ever before for outsiders to circumvent the party mainstays.

Of course, Barack Obama is no populist hack. He’s too Ivy League, too diffident. But his rise typifies many of the dangers we’re detailing. (Again, I credit Professor Ackerman with this point.) Here was an obscure and inexperienced state senator from Springfield, IL who bursts onto the scene by delivering a single rousing speech. He tracks to the left of the establishment candidate, Hillary Clinton, on the Iraq war. He out-fundraises and out-organizes his opponents by energizing partisans on the Internet. And he travels around the nation delivering anti-Washington rallies, filling up stadiums, and bringing his supporters to near convulsions and tears, along the way. For the democratic convention, he filled up a football stadium in Denver, CO, with 75,000 screaming followers – an inspirational picture of the future first African American president, no doubt, but an ominous image for anyone who fears popular demagogues. Obama is a constitutional lawyer with a penchant for compromise. But his 2008 campaign was – we shouldn’t forget – basically a high-tech barnstorming.

Each day we witness the clash between our modern populist presidency and the antique political system that was designed to contain him. The most democratic of processes — the American presidential election, which for 18 months plays out like the slow unfolding our national geist, on prime-time television – installs the least democratic of our leaders. Our president controls the military, but not the legislature. He is strong — “imperial” as Arthur Schlesinger said — and also weak — unable to pass even the most mild forms of the agenda he was voted in to pass. The fact that Obama has failed with cap-and-trade, the public option, the Employee Free Choice Act, etc. is balanced out by his asserted right to sentence U.S. citizen Anwar al-Awlaki to death without trial, or indeed any due process, for reasons he calls “state secrets.” Having more power over our Empire than our Republic, our president can kill anyone he pleases, but can’t pass a jobs act.

With all this in mind, we can start speculating about the end of the American Republic. What happens when a populist leader who is swept into office by a national mandate, and who controls our vast military, clashes with an obstructionist Congress?  What if she decides that she’s politically powerful enough to ignore Congress’s consent? Everything — everything — unravels from there.

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Bachmann’s chances of becoming president are low, but non-negligible. As of July, Bachmann was leading the Republican field. Her numbers are lower now, but poll results at this stage are notoriously inaccurate. (Remember, Obama was 20 points behind Hillary Clinton at this time four years ago.) As readers and writers of this magazine, living in the northeast, at Harvard, or in NYC, or in DC, we’re at systematic risk of underestimating her appeal. In a head-to-head with Obama, she’s behind by only 4%.

But how would she win? As Nate Silver explains, she’d have to go through Iowa. And how would that happen? Let’s say – and go with this for a second – there was a terrorist attack on DC tomorrow. (And why won’t there be?) A number of predictable things will happen: anti-Islamic sentiment surges, the stock market crashes, and our utterly broken government looks sympathetic, and weak, like a child in need of saving. Perry and Romney give forceful denunciations of terrorism, but they seem out of their element, like Bush-era reruns, bullies and fakers, like men. Instead of a speech, Bachmann travels to the heart of the country and holds a rally. Tens of thousands of people come from all over, and her performance is weirdly extraordinary. She doesn’t mention terrorism. She talks about God, and America, and being a mother. She wins Iowa, her home state, by a landslide, and it’s all momentum from there. The front-runner now, she draws huge crowds as she tours the four corners of the country, regardless of what state she’s competing in next, and the media, whose fear of her and fixation on her is unashamed, only make her stronger. She wins the nomination and Obama, who’s overseen a terrorist attack and the worst economic situation since the Great Depression, doesn’t stand a chance. Bachmann is president.

Is this possible? In June, Intrade.com, the world’s best market for predicting political events, put the combined probability of Michelle Bachmann, Ron Paul, or Sarah Palin becoming president together at above 10%. Assuming for the sake of argument that this number is true, it follows (with a bit of a syllogistic stretch) that we’re roughly 10 rolls of the die away from one of these extremists becoming president. And ten roles of the die, in terms of electoral cycles, is 40 years. Or of course, it could be now.

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It’s hard to overstate how dysfunctional, claustrophobic and spectatorial our political have become. A few central players (your Paul Ryans, your Nancy Pelosis, and whoever has tweeted his penis recently) dominate our TVs time slots, in a socio-cultural space occupied by Kim Kardashian and Steve Jobs and the like. For most of us, the central experience of American democracy has become watching pundits on TV, who watch our president, as “we the people” sit in our living rooms, basically alone.

On the day a King or Queen walks into the presidency, we’ll be twice removed from the royalty we thought we chose. We built the throne. And now — to our embarrassment and relief — we have to watch her sit in it.

When I first encountered Google+, I was surprised and delighted, and then, shortly after that, I was bored. Like many American cultural events – like the premiere of The Hills or the release of George W. Bush’s memoir – the launch of Google+ managed to evoke surprise and boredom, at once. It’s technically very fine, and ontologically “new,” and yet the platform feels, somehow, utterly the same, like a high-class rerun.

I use the phrase “cultural event” advisedly. For Google+ isn’t just another piece of Google software; it is – as its name implies – a sort of second coming of Google itself. While most Google releases are hacked-together-beta-versions of some brilliant new idea, Google+ is different. For one, it’s beautiful: it has the je ne sais quoi simplicity and elegance of the first iPod or an American Apparel t-shirt. And yet, at the same time, it’s an amazingly un-brilliant idea: here we find another set of unneeded social tools, another walled off, postmoderny terrarium, where everything is stimulation and fragmentation and ephemera, of the type that we’ve already seen so much of. The “second coming” of Google, one realizes – with surprise and boredom – has taken the form of a Facebook rip-off with a shiny finish.

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Theorists of capitalism make the distinction between “sustaining” innovations and “disruptive” ones. Sustaining innovations improve upon existing institutions, while disruptive innovations undermine those institutions, by giving us something new. Google has always traded in disruption: Page Rank, Google Docs, their Maps API, Google Books, Google Voice, ChomeBook, self-driving cars… But Google+ is different. It’s sustaining in the extreme. We get an incremental improvement upon a social networking model that was (to say the least) dubious to begin with, a model where people share and connect with their friends within “walled-off gardens,” according to tightly restricted rules, for the benefit of a single corporation’s bottom line. This is Facebook’s model. And now it’s Google’s.

There are many problems in this fallen world of ours, but I humbly suggest that my ability to share party photos and silly links with my friends is not one of them. Meanwhile, corporate ownerships of the means we have to communicate our ideas – corporate ownership of the “marketplace” of ideas we trade on – is one of the world’s problems. That Google would build the next major social networking platform by copying the most frivolous, and probably odious, features of the one we already have, makes it a turning point for Google, and, I fear, a warning sign for the rest of us. The age of the open web is coming to an end. The iconic company of that age, Google Inc., has sold out.

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Google’s flagship product, Google Search, made the Web accessible. Search tamed the chaos of the Web. And yet Google Inc., perhaps paradoxically, has also done more than any other company to demonstrate that the Web’s inherent orderlessness – its radical decentralization, its low-barriers-to-entry experimentalism, and its openness – could be an effective business model.

When techies talk about the “freedom” of the Web, they mean, basically, the freedom to build anything on the Web, without asking anyone’s permission. This freedom creates chaos, of course (as is freedom’s wont), but it also unleashes genius. If Google was to keep up with the chaos and genius of the Web, it believed that it would have to mirror it. As a practical matter, this meant that Google would engage in small, decentralized experiments; that employees would act as entrepreneurs (spending 20% of their time hacking together their own projects); apps would be released early, and iterated often; and almost everything would be given away for free. Because nearly all of its revenue would come from Search, and because Google Search is the main way the world enters the Web, Google’s growth would be tied inextricably with the growth and value of the Web. What’s good for the Web is thus, per force, good for Google. “Don’t be evil,” Google’s unofficial slogan, is a rational calculation.

Thus Google would be unlike any company ever built. It would be a platform for innovation, not a single service. It’s not an exaggeration to say, then, that the very essence of the company is constituted to give us products quite unlike Google+ – which is to say, products that are unrefined, often terrible, but sometimes revolutionary. Like the Web itself.

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But what happens when the Web begins to die? Or more precisely, when the locus of activity on the Internet (which is simply a neutral protocol for exchanging bits of data) shifts from those HTML-based “Web pages” that Google searches so well, to the closed and inaccessible world of apps, like Facebook, Pandora, Netflix, Twitter, Skype, Times Skimmer, and Angry Birds? To explain Google+, you must begin with this single fact: the major information infrastructure of our time, the Internet, is in the midst of a major restructuring. The sprawling labyrinth of the World Wide Web is being replaced by a rigidly ordered and centrally controlled world of apps.

Facebook is the face of this shift. Deeply integrated with the Web, Facebook is nevertheless something of its antonym. When you create with Facebook, you are following Facebook’s rules, which were approved by a single visionary CEO, who was acting on behalf of a single corporate entity. One does not have to be a 1960s-style pessimist to fear for the future of free speech in world where bi-directional communication platforms are owned in such a way. (Think: what if every printing press was designed according to the specifications of one corporation, and that corporation watched everything that was printed?) We return to the earlier question: What happens to a company such as Google when the substrate that it feeds upon, and has co-evolved around – the Web – accounts for than less 25% of the traffic on the Internet, and, as a classic Wired article from last summer pointed out, that number “is shrinking”?

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Google+ began with fear, not brilliance. To Vic Gundotra, Google+’s project lead, social software has been “the most epic failure of Google.” “Because we were focusing on organizing the world’s information,” Gundotra says, “the search company failed to do the most important search of all,” the search, that is, “for people.” According to this redemption narrative, Google+ saves Google from the sins of its own unsocial software, with Gundotra, naturally, as Christ. The story is compelling (especially for Gundrota). But is it true? If Google has really “epically failed” at building social software, then what should we make of Gmail, Google Groups, GChat, Google Docs, Blogger, YouTube, and Android, all of which, as a point of fact, mediate the majority of my digital communication with the people whom I care about? If these aren’t “social,” then what is? Or are we supposed to believe that Facebook’s form, an infinitesimally small blip in the long history of human communication, is the final form of “social”?

People like to say that “necessity is the mother of invention,” but as often as not, the opposite is the case. Necessity compels people to steal. For when you believe, as Google+’s project head Vic Gundotra apparently does, that you’re at a “bet-the-company” moment, you don’t invent radical new models, you steal the ones that work. And that’s what Google did. Conspicuously gone from Google+’s development process was Google’s famed decentralized and experimental ethos. While Facebook grew line-by-line, feature-by-feature – its development unfolding in real-time, like a national drama – Google+ was built by orders from the top, and then launched across a user base that was already hundreds of millions of people large. Gone from Google+’s final form, likewise, is the openness and expressiveness that defines the Web. The redemption story that Gundotra tells thus has a Greek twist: Google saves itself by turning against the principles that made its own life possible.

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If it’s true that our world needs an alternative to Facebook – if sharing ideas across networks is important, and yet the models we have are incomplete – then the stakes are high, for Google may be one of the only companies that could give us said alternative. It’s not immediately obvious why this is. In a perfectly competitive market, superior products should beat inferior ones. On the margins, one assumes, people will buy the better toaster. So if you want to compete with Facebook, why not just build a better Facebook?

It’s not that simple. Social networks can’t simply be out-competed by high quality products, because the quality of the product is itself a function of how many people are using. This is what economist call “positive network externalities”: the more people who join a network, the more valuable that network becomes for everyone; and in turn, the more valuable the network becomes, the more people have reason to join it – and so it grows, in a virtuous cycle. This gives Facebook, which came first, a huge advantage. The hyped start-up Diaspora, by contrast, gives us an almost-pathetic illustration of how hard it is to compete with Facebook by taking its basic form and working your way up from the bottom. Thus Google’s access to millions of user emails, and to millions of dollars in funding, makes it uniquely able to break the back of the positive network externality trap. Which makes Google+ that much sadder.

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Facebook’s legacy will likely be cultural, rather than technological. The Facebook story makes me happy to be alive: we live in a world where students no older than the writers of this magazine can create world-defining institutions, and do it without asking anyone’s permission. That is the freedom of the Web – and that is the freedom, paradoxically, that Facebook is slowly quelling, and the force, in the end, that may ultimately lead to its defeat. The company that beats Facebook will do so by emulating its story, not its form. It will beat the monopolistic company by giving us something totally new – something more open, more decentralized, more expressive. We cannot know for sure what that product will be, but one thing seems certain: it’s not Google+.

And as it happens, these charts are predictive — I am pretty secular.

Of course, if you asked me why – over drinks, maybe – I wouldn’t talk about demographic statistics. I’d give you explanations. I’d talk about John Dewey. I might channel old Bertrand Russell essays that I read when I was 14. I’d argue from the premise that I chose my beliefs as a thinking and feeling free mind. This wouldn’t be surprising; everyone can explain their beliefs.

But how seriously should we take those explanations? Did I really begin with an open-minded appraisal of my options, choose a Deweyian secular progressivism because it was the best possible position, and then proceed from there? Or did I begin where I am now, as a secular New York Jew who’s “unmusical” to religious things, and then go on to construct a vocabulary (with Dewey and Russell in it) to justify those beliefs that already existed? Charts like these caution skepticism. How seriously can we take beliefs that would be radically transformed by the roll of the demographic die – by being randomly born into another state, or to richer parents, or if we encountered different books, or met different people?

Richard Rorty tells us to be “ironic” towards our moral vocabulary. Use it to fight for a better world, he says; but acknowledge that the world we’re fighting in is not one of our choosing, and neither are the words we’re fighting with, or perhaps even the side of the fight we’re on.

That’s seems about right to me.

Some critics may point out that regardless of theory [that Islam has a strong tradition of governance by consent and rule by elected leaders], in reality a pattern of arbitrary, tyrannical, despotic government marks the entire Middle East and other parts of the Islamic world. Some go further, saying, “That is how Muslims are, that is how Muslims have always been, and there is nothing the West can do about it.” That is a misreading of history. One has to look back a little way to see how Middle Eastern government arrived at its current state.

The change took place in two phases. Phase one began with Bonaparte’s incursion and continued through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries when Middle Eastern rulers, painfully aware of the need to catch up with the modern world, tried to modernize their societies, beginning with their governments. These transformations were mostly carried out not by imperialist rulers, who tended to be cautiously conservative, but by local rulers—the sultans of Turkey, the pashas and khedives of Egypt, the shahs of Persia—with the best of intentions but with disastrous results. Modernizing meant introducing Western systems of communication, warfare, and rule, inevitably including the tools of domination and repression. The authority of the state vastly increased with the adoption of instruments of control, surveillance, and enforcement far beyond the capabilities of earlier leaders, so that by the end of the twentieth century any tin-pot ruler of a petty state or even of a quasi state had vastly greater powers than were ever enjoyed by the mighty caliphs and sultans of the past….

…The second stage of political upheaval in the Middle East can be dated with precision. In 1940, the government of France surrendered to Nazi Germany. A new collaborationist government was formed and established in a watering place called Vichy, and General Charles de Gaulle moved to London and set up a Free French committee. The French empire was beyond the reach of the Germans at that point, and the governors of the French colonies and dependencies were free to decide: they could stay with Vichy or rally to de Gaulle. Vichy was the choice of most of them, and in particular the rulers of the French-mandated territory of Syria-Lebanon, in the heart of the Arab East. This meant that Syria-Lebanon was wide open to the Nazis, who moved in and made it the main base of their propaganda and activity in the Arab world.

It was at that time that the ideological foundations of what later became the Baath Party were laid, with the adaptation of Nazi ideas and methods to the Middle Eastern situation. The nascent party’s ideology emphasized pan-Arabism, nationalism, and a form of socialism. The party was not officially founded until April 1947, but memoirs of the time and other sources show that the Nazi interlude is where it began. From Syria, the Germans and the proto-Baathists also set up a pro-Nazi regime in Iraq, led by the famous, and notorious, Rashid Ali al-Gailani.

Now, go forward a few decades, and here’s how Noam Chomsky and Gilbert Achcar characterize the rise of Islamic fundamentalism (in Perilous Power):

Chomsky: Islamic fundamentalism is mainly a reaction to forces of unrest in the world. For many years there was a strong secular nationalism all over the Arab and Muslim world. Egypt’s Gama Abdel-Nasser was a secular nationalist. Iraq has a long tradition of secular nationalism that goes back a century, with democratizing efforts and so on. Iran had a secular national program ove ra half-century ago, at the time of government of Mohammed Mossdegh was overthown in 1953. The failure of secular nationalism which was both internal and external, and was strongly attacked from the outside, left a vacuum, and I think to an extent the vacuum was filled by Islamic fundamentalism.

Archer: I would be even more straightforward than that. The present strength of Islamic fundamentalism is a direct product of very direct U.S. policies. What you’ve said is perfectly correct, but with the priviso added that secular nationalism has been weakened and destroyed by the United States as its main enemy. In the 1960s, the dominant trend in the Muslim world in general was secular nationalism and, in the Arab world, Arab nationalism as embodied by Egyptian president Gamal Abdel-Nasser. The United States fought this brand of nationalism, basing itself on the most reactionary brand of Islamic fundamentalism implemented and propagated by the Saudi kingdom.

Democratization is not an ahistorical process that procedes neutrally across time and space. In the real world, when you fight for democracy, you are fighting against specific undemocratic forces — against specific people who gained power in specific ways, at a specific time, weilding specific historical ideas, and so on.

If we admit that this is how history works — that history is a “dialectic,” and the present is a direct response to forces of the past — then it becomes very relevant to the nature of the Arab Spring that the authoritarian governments these protestors opposed were not only actively supported by Western governments in some specific cases, but were also buoyed intellectually by the deeper historical currents of Western authoritarianism, including modernization and totalitarianism.

You can consider this evidence of the West’s deleterious effect on the world, if you want; but that’s not really my point. My point is just a historiographic one: it’s absurd to say that the “Arab world” is “incapable” of democracy, as if there were some essential construct called the Arab world. It’s also absurd to say, then, that protesters shouldn’t be utilizing Western tools like Facebook and Twitter, or adopting Western constitutional forms, as if this were just foreign imperialism by another means. No, the Middle East today is a product of a past that is inextricably linked to deep global cultural influence, and its present struggles, a reaction to this past, are therefore scripted in part by that global cultural influence. It really couldn’t be otherwise.

Photo credit: New America Media

Here’s how the story goes: Groupon’s business model isn’t defensible, because anyone can set up an email list with coupons; its business practices aren’t profitable, indeed they’re losing the company so much money that Groupon will literally be bankrupt in two quarters if it doesn’t get another round of financing; and its primary asset — a huge network of customers and merchants — is atrophying over time, yielding less money per user with each passing day.

Its investors understand this dynamic, the story continues. But because their interest is in the value of Groupon stock, and Groupon stock will become more valuable if the company IPOs, Groupon’s backers want the company to IPO. At that point, they can dump their shares onto a gullible public’s lap, and leave with their profits in hand. It’s worth noting here that a full 80% of the last 950 million dollars Groupon raised went to paying off previous investors who wanted to cash out.

So that’s the cynical story. But there’s an alternative one. This sunnier story casts Groupon as a fresh and exciting company that’s making its money by improving the world – by helping merchants get more from their local communities and helping customers live bigger lives. (Get publicity and earn income! Learn to scuba dive and find a new BBQ place!) Groupon here is figured as synecdoche for a whole class of networked, game-dynamic tech companies that together constitute one of the most vital growth sectors of our economy. And here’s the crucial part: Without IPO, the average American can’t get any piece of that. Most Americans simply don’t have the money to buy stock in secondary markets, where private equity players trade Facebook and Zynga stock with venture capitalists; and now that most Americans’ retirement funds have switched from defined-benefit pension funds, which could and did invest in private equity, to defined-contribution 401ks and IRAs, they can’t invest collectively either. (See Felix Salmon for more.) By some estimates, we have more stock traded in secondary markets today than ever before in American history. Which means that the rich get sole dibs on the tech sector. The Groupon IPO, therefore, is a turn away from that trend.

Whether that’s a good thing or a bad thing – which story you believe, in other words – depends on how likely you think Groupon will fail.

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Summing up the company’s financials, David Heinemeier Hansson writes:

At the moment, it’s costing [Groupon] $1.43 to make $1, and it doesn’t look like it’s getting any cheaper. They’re already projected to make close to three billion dollars in revenues this year. If you can’t figure out how to make money on three billion in revenue, when exactly will the profit magic be found? Ten billion? Fifty billion?

In its older markets, Groupon’s appears to be declining over time, on a per user basis:

And finally, on the product level, there are a lot of important questions about how much value Groupon really creates for local businesses:

Only about 1% of Groupon users become regular customers. Groupon represents about 50% of the deals run by our clients. It’s easily the most effective way to get hundreds or even thousands of people through the door of a salon with one day’s advertising. The problem is that the cost of sale doesn’t really add up for the salon owner. Generally a salon only needs to convert about 10% of Groupon buyers into regular clients for it to make financial sense but based on our internal data we’re only seeing conversion rates of about 1%. Think about that for a second. A salon with three staff sells a thousand deals and only ten of these come back again and pay normal prices. That’s over a thousand man hours (at least two months) of loss-making treatments to gain seven new clients.

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These are valid concerns. Groupon is a young business. Facebook is seven years old and still hasn’t IPO’d; Groupon is two years old. Who knows whether it will fail?

But here’s the thing: an obsessive concern with its present financials is unlikely to answer this question. Read the commentators above, and you’d think that investing in Groupon is like grading a term paper — that the criteria for judgment is the past, not the future. The fact is, Groupon can change; its core business, with all its features and flaws, may well be totally different in one year’s time. Indeed, I suspect that Groupon’s shaky financials are a reflection of this very ambition: their willingness to undercut profitability for growth is born out of their belief that product innovation depends on scale. That once their network is large enough — once they’ve built relationships with practically every merchant in the country, and have access to the inbox of nearly every American with discretionary income — they’ll be able to connect both sides of the market in creative ways we haven’t yet imagined. “There are many ways to skin a cat,” it’s been said; likewise, there are many ways to intermediate sellers and buyers, once you’ve got access to both. Maybe next they’ll do an auction, like Ebay? Or do delivery, like Amazon? They’ve already launched Groupon Now, which is hugely ambition and totally different from an email list. In other words, Groupon isn’t a “daily deals” site; it’s a market-maker for the local economy. That’s the big idea. That’s the reason to invest.

Groupon critics often miss this point. But to think otherwise is to misunderstand how tech operates in our economy. When information technology is applied to a given industry, it changes that industry to the core. Entrepreneurs call this “disruption.” The news industry was disrupted; so was the music industry; so was political campaigning, book publishing, and (soon?) banking, gaming, and television. As Chris Dixon writes, “Predicting the future of the Internet is easy: anything it hasn’t yet dramatically transformed, it will.” But of course, the internet has yet to “dramatically transform” our local business economy. It’s helped us search for stores (Yelp, Google Maps); but it hasn’t changed our relationship to them. Thus the promise of Groupon.

With tech, what matters is the “category” you operate in (what industry you’re disrupting), not merely your product or your market. It’s easy to pivot products, it’s possible to leave markets, but you’re always locked into a category. And it must be said, Groupon operates in a huge and undeniably inefficient category, one ripe for disruption. The local economy structures our daily lives and yet hasn’t been altered in dozens of years — a state of affairs reminiscent of friends networks before Facebook or the music industry before iTunes. Thus if Groupon is the company that finally “disrupts” local business, it will be because it invested so heavily in strategic power within this category — because it invested in growth, even at the cost of performance. Groupon isn’t competing in a market with a product; it’s trying to dominate a category. Its ambitions are much larger than any financial statement would reveal: it wants to change the world.

Photo credit: Business Insider