Single Serving Site Alert

Just a quick note for those few, those brave, those patient who haven’t completely migrated to Facef*ck or ThighSpace or Twatter or whatever social disease network is the flavour of the moment, and still stop by or RSSize the ‘bottle to get an occasional taste of Grandpa Wonderchicken’s Old-Style Longform Bullshit.
A while back, one morning, when I heard that Kevin Rose (of Digg and the late, not terribly lamented Pownce) had a new Twitter-parasite site called WeFollow, I lost my shit (“You might follow, you tiny-dreamed weasel farts!” said I to myself, or something of the sort.) and bought a domain, threw up a WordPress site, wrote a screed and did a couple of photoshops, all before lunch. If I was that productive all the time, I’d be… well, I wouldn’t have the time for insane vanity mini-projects like that, I guess.
Still: here it is, the lastest addition to the burgeoning Wonderchicken Industries™ Network. Share and enjoy.

Hockey! It’s A Sport!

So I was hanging around at the Metafilter, as I do, and I was posting the occasional comment, as I do, and drinking beer, as I do, because it was a Friday night, and that’s what I tend to do on a Friday night.
Another guy, this Canadian guy, this guy who’d lived in Japan for a few years and eventually gone back to Canada, someone I’d identified with even though I don’t rightly know if I ever will actually go back to Canada, had said

At least it’s not hockey. What a stupid sport.
(Although these are my true feelings, to say this publicly in Canada is close to something like sacrilege, and I’m not exaggerating.)

So I got my shit all up in a righteous internet uproar and said (and reproduce here because I’d like to remember I said it, self-indulgent and shouty as it is):
I spent a decade or two of my post-pubescent life, times when I was actually in Canada at least part-time and it seemed to matter, telling people how much I fucking didn’t care about hockey, because, you know, that’s what a certain kind of guy does. But I’d sit and watch the goddamn game and drink a hell of a lot of booze and take whatever drugs were to hand and make inappropriate and often successful sexual advances at the desperately bored women who were hanging around unwilling having their own fun while the idiot rinktard puckheads got their stick on.
But I’ll tell you this: I fucking love hockey now, in retrospect, but only in the abstract because I love the idea of stupid toothless meatpuppets beating the living shit out of each other on the ice for the amusement of the Home Audience. I used to poo-poo all the Sport, oh dear, Maynard my Special Friend it’s so commmmon and tedious, I in latter days used to and still do wave a dismissive hand-back at the reality TV and the unreality TV and the fake pretending to be real pretending to be fake winking at the real, I did, I do, but you know what? these days I love it all. I love it all in equal measure to how much I despise it because I am absolutely sure that things, where ‘things’ is meant to be Our Collective Cultural Heritage A-squander, where ‘things’ is meant to be the inexorable ramscoop of the idiocracy screaming V2ey nose-down into the fake peatbog made of plastic turf and celebrity poop, it’s OK that it’s all turning to Entertainment and Distraction at a rate of (k)nots, and I get a Roma-rsonist frisson from tossing my cigarette butts and lighting support blazes out on the periphery hoping ring-a-rosy all burn down without me having to make a stand.
So, yeah. Hockey is stupid, duh, but you know what: the problem with hockey is that it’s not nearly as goddamn stupid as it used to be or should be, when the gladiators dropped glove and knocked pearly white teeths out onto the ice in a spray of blood. It’s gotten smarter since then, instrumentally more reasonable, disappointingly less savage, and that’s a cheat and a con and it’s more modern and marketed and less satisfying.
Fucking weedy reedy thinskinned worthless goddamn civilization we’ve built.

My Home Is Dying

When you grow up in the far north in Canada, if you’re at all curious about the world and the people in it, you can’t wait to get out. As soon as you’re able, you head out to the big city, for work or school or whatever you can get. It isn’t such a different story from kids growing up in the boonies anywhere, where it’s Montana or Gangwon-do in Korea, western New South Wales or the Cyclades.
I grew up, for the years that counted at least, in Fort Saint James, British Columbia. During those years — the early 70′s to the early 80′s — it was the End of The Road. Vanderhoof was the asshole of the world and we were forty miles up it, we said, recycling that old standby. The paved highway ended in the Fort, and to go further north meant logging roads and endless washboard and pothole gravel, dusty in summer, solid ice in winter, and slicker than snot the rest of the time. There were a couple of reservations further up there, and a few scattered fishing lodges and mines and logging camps. Wilderness, though, for the most part. Endless dense forest carpetting mountains, nap worn smooth in spots by crystal-clear cold lakes and rivers. Germanson Landing. Takla Landing. Leo Creek. Deese Lake. I’d like to say I hunted bear in these places wearing nothing but a breechclout and bowie knife, but with parents who were grappling with living on the frontier after moving from southern Ontario and a little shellshocked by family tragedy, the names of these tiny, isolated places were almost as exotic to me as Tokyo or Timbuktu. We didn’t stray too far.
But our own tiny town of 2500 or so was frontier enough for anyone, and, in what feels all these decades later like a deliberate, considered balance to the more bookish side of my nature, but was probably just imposed on me by the environment, I spent a lot of my time outdoors. In the summer especially, I’d spend 5 or 6 hours a day just behind our house swimming in the cold runoff-fed waters of Stuart Lake, or buckling on my first-gen Sony Walkman and riding my bicycle further and further out along the limited network of paved roads that snaked out along it, or to the south towards Vanderhoof, or the 10 or 15 kilometers north to the saw mills, after which the asphalt just stopped. Looking for something.
The trees never ended. The trees were everywhere. There were some things, growing up, that seemed limitless in their supply, overabundant, somehow both comforting and a little obnoxious in their insistence on being a part of every experience you could have: the trees, the water, and the snow. Nobody, or at least no young people that I knew, ever entertained for a moment the possibility that these things weren’t eternal, perpetual, guaranteed. We were ants on a golf course, surrounded by plenty, living the good life, and occasionally cursing the sprinklers.
For my part, I was one of those young people — and by no means was I in the majority — who couldn’t wait to get out, and once out, stayed. But I was also in a minority of the escapees, I think, in that I loved the place, even before I left. I’d read enough science fiction as a preteen to know that the dystopian extrapolations of scorched and dusty futures were based on the lives that people in more populous and less resource-blessed places were living already. I wasn’t all that keen to hunker down or bunker up.
I was afraid in a weirdly longing way of the nukes we assumed would soon be sailing along gravity’s rainbow, even if I was confident that up there in the North we’d be relatively unscathed by the coming armageddon. But I loved the sulphurous mineral rich town water that stained porcelain orange. I loved the thunderstorms that rolled in from the west over the 60 kilometre expanse of the lake, the bloodsplash summer forest fire sunsets, the northern lights you could almost hear, the way the hip-deep powdery snow creaked and puffed when the temperature got down to 40 below zero and your eyelashes began to freeze together. I loved the dusty evergreen smell of the trees and the rocks when we climbed up Mount Pope under flawless blue skies, I loved skindiving out to the drop-off in the lake, where the water, clear as air, grew dark and frightening, and my lungs felt ready to burst as I tried again and again to see what was down there, every minute irrationally terrified remembering the stories of giant sturgeon that had been pulled from those depths in decades past. I loved riding out on the lake in boats, and even riding on the river, even though that’s where my younger brother had died, in that fast dark water, when I was 6 years old. I loved blizzards and whiteouts, and waking up in the morning to see drifts of fresh snow that reached the roof of our house in beautiful mathematical arcs. I loved standing in our cold kitchen in my robe in the winter mornings before school while my mom made me breakfast, over the floor grate as the furnace blew hot air up my legs. I loved when the spring came and the roads and streets shed their dirty ice shells, and I could once again hop on my bicycle and prowl the streets, nose in the air smelling that good spring smell, hoping that maybe I’d see the girl I was in love with, but almost never seeing her. I loved the brief melancholy autumn smell of wet leaves in the freezing rain.
I didn’t fit in very well in many ways, though I tried, and once I began to drink — the official sport of Northern BC — it became much easier, and much as there were many people I loved and still love in that place, in some ways it was the place itself that made the greatest mark on me. I am and always will be someone who loves things green and blue and clean, and a smalltown boy who hauls out his big-city credentials and plays the global nomad urban expat sophisticate with a little reluctance.
I’ve been an expatriate most of the last 20 years and I’ll probably never live there again, but it will always be a huge part of who I am.
The reason our little town has existed and more or less thrived in the last century or so, though it was the first capital of British Columbia back in the fur trading goldrush days of the 19th century, has been the forestry industry. It’s a beautiful place, and tourists do come, but the lumber mills have always, at least in the last few lifetimes, provided something like 80% of the jobs, and powered an even larger component of the overall economy. It has been the same story for most of the small towns in the region. I worked in the mills too, bitching and moaning and drinking away the bruises, during my summer vacations from UBC, back in the 80′s. Taught me the value of hard work, and how much I don’t really care for it.
All that’s coming to an end. The trees are dying, and with them, the towns. It’s the pine beetle, you see. Just tiny little bugs. Nothing so dramatic as bombs or storms or ice caps melting away.
People like to debate the phenomenon of global climate change as if it were an academic issue. People who don’t live in the path of the huang-sa dust storms that sweep in out of China to blanket Korea every spring, and get worse with each passing year, people who aren’t in Central British Columbia watching 85% of the pine trees die off, and with the trees, the futures of their children. People whose health or livelihood isn’t directly affected.
But then again, those British Columbians aren’t entirely blameless, unlike the poor Koreans (and me) who are sucking down heavy metal-laden dust that we had no part in creating. While noting that the pine beetles are a natural part of the ecosystem, Canadian ecosuperhero (at least for my generation) David Suzuki blames forest fire suppression, clearcutting (and subsequent replanting), global warming. The first two can be laid directly at the feet of the folks who live there, whether they like to admit it or not.
The global warming part is textbook: to put it simply, as I understand it, warmer winters means reduced insect die off in the coldest part of the year, which means more of the little buggers the following season, and warmer temperatures the rest of the year means they spread further.
Forest fire suppression breaks the necessary cycle of old growth die off and renewal.
Clearcutting means huge areas are effectively denuded, and replanting with a single species of tree means a lack of biodiversity in the new forest, green as it may appear.
The bugs have rushed in as a result, and whole region is in very big trouble.
In the 6 years leading up to 2007 130,000 square kilometres of pine forest have been destroyed by the beetles. To put that number in perspective, that’s the area of the country of England, or about one and a half times the area of South Korea. It’s an armageddon all right, but not the kind that gave me nightmares when I was a teenager.
The irony to all this is that the massive die off of pines (and the infestation is moving to spruce, apparently) means, according to some researchers, that the forests of BC will no longer act as a carbon sink for the earth’s atmosphere, but by 2020 will become a carbon source, making the problems even worse. It wouldn’t be excesssive to describe this as a calamity. An area the size of a small country will be filled with standing kindling, which means forest fires will rage on a scale never before seen — imagine, again, the entire country of England aflame for a sense of the scale involved.
Imagine that.
And companies that practiced unsustainable clearcutting, and the successive governments that allowed it? A special circle of hell will hopefully be reserved for those bastards. You know, if you believe in that sort of thing.
Have a look at this, to get an idea what those greedy f–kers have done to my home, and to our collective heritage over the past few decades. First, what the forests around my hometown (it’s at the tip of Stuart Lake, there, center left) looked like in 1973, not long after my family moved there. Unbroken green, punctuated only by the blue of the northern lakes, and some farmland around Vanderhoof, down there at the lower left.

Now have a look at the same area in 1999. See the clearcuts? See what ‘stewardship of the resource’ has meant? See the spots, like some kind of mange, some horrific skin disease? Good job, you scum. You’ve burned your own house down around your ears. Thanks, American owners of Canadian forestry companies! You’ve screwed us again.

I have nothing against forestry. I have nothing against logging. It has been the lifeblood of the community that made me who I am, and supported people I know and love (and some I don’t care for so much, I admit.)
What I can’t and couldn’t ever ignore, yeah, even while I was sweeping up the damp rich sawdust for fifteen bucks an hour, is the ways in which it has been pursued. And now, finally, the bats are coming home to roost, and it will be decades before the province and the industry recovers. Next time, maybe, they’ll do it right. If there is enough fossil fuel left to do it, and any communities left to work there.
So what’s happening on the ground? Two years ago, when I last visited Canada, I drove a rented car from Vancouver the 1100km north to Fort Saint James. There were stretches of a hundred kilometres and more where every tree that lined the highway on either side, once stately and evergreen and immutable, was the dull reddish brown of standing deadwood. It was a terrible thing to see. My mother, who was mayor of Fort Saint James for 14 years and still lives there, painted a pretty gloomy picture when we last talked. Of the 4 lumber mills that have provided most of the economic steam to run the community for decades, two are out of business, and one, run by the native community, is limping along with about 50 employees. Young families are leaving in droves. Real estate prices are plummeting, and houses are standing empty. Last year was one of the best ever for tourism, and that will hopefully never change, but other towns in less beautiful areas are in the process of drying up and blowing away.
Trees take decades to grow in Northern British Columbia. The good times are not going to come back any time soon.
I don’t pay much attention to goings-on in Canada. I don’t know how much attention is being paid to this. I suppose people are too worried about the coming real estate bust in the cities. I suppose the economic boom and environmental nightmare of the oil sands in Alberta offers some distraction. I don’t know. But what I am sure about is that my hometown is dying.
I have mixed feelings.
The forests will come back. The forestry industry and government will, we can only hope, learn some lessons. People will relocate — Canada is a nation of migrants — and towns will shrink and maybe disappear. It’s probably just wishful thinking, but it would be nice to think that things will shift toward a real attitude of sustainability and stewardship.
No matter how it all plays out, a lot of people will be hurt in the process. It takes a lot of good to outweigh the pain that the end of a way of life brings.
It’s happening all over the world. They say change is good. They say a lot of stuff.
Update: The news is that a local (-ish) company has taken over the largest mill in Fort Saint James, the one that closed a year ago. They are aware and resigned to the fact that they will lose money for a good while, but they are focused on the long-term. This is fantastic news for the town — it means hundreds of jobs, and means the town will not dry up and blow away. Other towns may not be so lucky, but I am gratified that my hometown at least seems to be looking at a stay of execution.
Update 2, Fall 2010: My mother’s been mayor again after more than a decade out of the job — Mayor Sandy to the rescue! — and things, in part through good timing and in part through her political skills, have turned around to an almost astonishing degree. The downtown core has been revitalized and renovated, a new gold mine is going in north of town adding hundreds of new jobs and millions in new tax revenue and businesses, there’s not a single rental space available in town, and everything is humming the way it hasn’t since…. well, since the last time my mother was mayor, to be honest. While the rest of the region is undergoing severe economic difficulties stemming from the problems I talked about here, at least FSJ is weathering the storm. Even if I never end up back there — a vanishingly unlikely possibility — that’s still very comforting to know.

Here’s a pretty word cloud, in celebration:

Lomans not shamans

You know what? I’m a little weary of hearing about your conferences, your camps, your cozy cash-on-the-barrelhead confabs.
I don’t want to know what web-shaking new thoughts percolated through the sponsored-by-Starbuck’s IRC backchannel while some Internet Smellovision™ rep droned and powerpointed onstage. I don’t really need to see more Flickr pictures of grinning gaggles of bloggers glistening with teraflopsweat, a little too eager to prove that they socialize in other venues besides World of Warcraft.
Don’t try and tell me that ‘business weblogs’ or ‘the business of weblogs’ are anything but business. Go ahead and do your business. Make your money: we’ve all got to. Convene with your peers and drive your value propositions down the ROI highway. It’s all good. We’re lucky if we can make a living doing something we love. But if what you do and what you say in this shared textual space of ours is about selling something, then it’s about selling something. Don’t bullshit us. Lines blur; everything gets a price tag slapped on it.
I’m not looking at your ads, and there’s no way I’m clicking them, unless I’m right-clicking on them to add them to my Adblock list, and I’m cursing you for making me go through that small tribulation.
Then my nose opens up and the fingers begin to flex when I read again how you were talking to that netfamous guy about this other well-known weblog guy, because that’s what famous internet guys do — they network. They do it publicly, and dignify it by calling it ‘conversation’. Networking obviates the need for latex gloves while giving a socialmedia reacharound.
Conversation as intercourse. Intercourse as commerce. You know somebody’s getting f–ked. I think it might be us. Ad copy tattoed on our lover’s forehead, and we’re so inured to it that we don’t even notice anymore. We’re trying to make love in the middle of the marketplace, but we’re just getting screwed.
Conferences are where salesmen go. Because that’s what salesmen do — they network. They sell. They place ads where we’ll see them, so they can sell us something. Salespeople. Salespersons, I guess. Salors and salestresses. They sell. Lomans, not shamans.
We’ve got the salesman archetype etched into the cultural DNA by now — we see cheap suit a little sad, a little desperate, the armpit-stained Flying Dutchman of the strip malls. We hear faux-friendly NLP-creepy patter, we cringe, even if we’re not sure why. Salesman selling something at us makes our sphincters tighten in a pre-fight-or-flight reflex. Does mine, anyway. And thanks at least in part to the blithely worshipful way that your average blogjockey has of beating the bones together at the foot of the Google Monolith, Adsense has infiltrated our online culture, has made slightly sad dry-haired Holiday Inn revenants of all of us, trapped in a coach seat next to some guy trying to sell us some shit we don’t need, waiting to get a word in edgewise so we can sell him some shit he doesn’t want.
My god, it’s full of ads! Ads by Goooooooooogle. There’s something hidden in that inviting string of ‘ooooooooooo’s waiting to be teased out by a modern day steganographic Nostradamus. While making his ‘o’ face.
(Yeah, I flog Dreamhost here, and I run Adsense on one of my other sites. I’ve become as guilty of this sort of whoring as the next poor rube. I’m squatting as deep in the shit as you are, pants around my ankles, ‘raising the level of discourse’.)
But look: all of the conference references, all the logrolling backscratching insular techmeme circlejerk, all of the third-column index page stacks packed with the javascripty fruit of the Adsensorium, the 120-pixel hello-surfer come-ons… well, it’s enough already.
‘But wonderchicken, my cranky friend,’ you may well object. ‘If you don’t like it, just stop reading it! Nobody’s holding your feet to the fire here. Let those who can and want to spend their time and money sitting in threadworn conference centres with others of their adoptive sept and clan do so, and do not begrudge them their participation in the Monetary Blogdustrial Complex. It is an Engine of The New Economy! It is a bitwork bulwark against the Old Media Hegemony, from which we can together launch our Social Media Enfilade! A rising tide of advertising and self-promotion lifts all boats! We need the evangelists and the shills to Get The Word Out! The Long Tail will always be there wagging the Big Dogs, rich strata of abandoned and automated weblogs, linkfarms and pr0n, and lonely people bellowing out across the virtual rooftops to their audiences of search bots, googlenauts and bemused relatives. The human experience, made hyperlinked. Google will index it all, and get rich on the carrion-clicks that it sells to the office cubicle fools who Aren’t Us! It’s a Brand® New Day!’
Yeah, I know. But I felt like I needed to launch a barbaric yawp into the aether, because I miss it sometimes. And these things can be bad for you if you just let them build up inside. Hi Dave!

Writing Open Some New Blogholes

Now, I usually do make a token attempt not to follow up one mock-apoplectic rant with even more negativity and waving of the stiff central digit, but sometimes resistance is futile.
I wish this was satire.
Or maybe I don’t. One of the things that keeps me from losing my sense of humour these days, from metaphorically climbing the clocktower and metaphorically mowing down some motherf–kers, is that reality continues to gear up, rev up, and blow the ad-decaled doors off of satire and parody and all those other words whose meanings I’m a little fuzzy on. You don’t have to dig very deep to bring up some rich, loamy laughs.
Those of us who like to tell a funny joke once in a while (and some do it better than others) to keep the eyeball pressure down so that goo doesn’t start jetting out in waxy spurts all over our kith and kin, we’re hard-pressed to say much that tops the news of the day, though. Flipping on CNN for a few minutes yields more black-souled yucks than when we try and fail to wax Swiftian, let alone wax Brazilian. There’s no payoff, and nothing’s sadder than a failed Swifty.
Well, OK, dead babies are maybe sadder. I’m playing this fast and loose, as usual.
Anyway, this was supoosed to be one of my usual curmudgeonly contrarian screeds that veers from quixotacular tilting at the capitalist machine, to random cursing and mumbling, to alienating and insulting my weblog comrades, so I’d best get on with it.
In case you didn’t follow the link, Blogonomics is a conference dedicated to the lofty goal of cashing in on weblogs, on board a cruise ship from Florida to Cozumel. You couldn’t make this up. I couldn’t, at least.
Check it out: they’ve even hidden the fine print at the bottom of this page by making it almost the same babyshit colour as the background. Oooh, that’s clever! Very business-y! Tells us a little about who they’re pandering to, too.
Screw Blogonomics in its speedo-clad afterdeck-hottub authentic-voiced bum.
Better yet, somebody take up a collection, and get me and Rageboy and on this f–king boat, load us up with speed, rye and cigarettes (or some coffee for Mr Boy, I suppose, since I seem to recall he’s left the Joy of Intoxication behind), and let us write open some new blogholes for these people.
That’d be some kind of fun. And hell, even if the Quintana Roo coast has been thrashed to a Jose Cuervo-flavoured pulp, we can still make a few bucks off it, right? It’s only business, after all.
Update: for some very much related thoughts that aren’t just ranty wordplay, go read Dave, who has said what I would like to about the background to this with, as always, more light and less heat than I throw off.

The Goo

Weblog people love to jerk off into the Google Kleenex™ (still in beta), rub the resultant mess all over their faces, then post about it on their sites. They’re putting the Goo into Google at thousands of litres per second. They’d pile on and collectively hump it into a smoking hole in the ground if they could find enough holes to plug with their techno-weiners (or grind its G-pelvis to dust, if they’re she-geeks, I suppose).
Investors love the Goo as well. If they got in on the ground floor, they’ve made enough money that they just don’t give a shit what’s going on in the dungeons beneath the Googleplex. “Hell, the cafeteria lunches are legendary, and the corporate motto is “Don’t be evil”, right? Look at that stock price! We’re too busy running around naked with bouquets of rolled-up dollar bills sticking out of our asses to worry about details!”
Advertisers, the whoring undead scum that take everything they touch and convert it to shit, they’re nuts-deep in the Goo. After all, Google is an advertising company first and foremost, now. If it’s not the world’s biggest trader of weapons of shit conversion, it’s certainly the most exciting. “The eyeballs! The delicious sweet tangy eyeballs, filled with goo! Let a thousand text-ads bloom!”
Hell, I use its services a hundred times a day, literally. There’s wonderchicken goo in the bucket, too.
We live in a world where the country that calls itself the Champion of Freedom and Democracy tortures prisoners in an archipelago of secret prisons. Where the evil dimwit homunculus known inexplicably as the Leader of The Free World unapologetically claims the right to spy on the communications of his own citizens. A squinting faux-cowboy weasel who launches his hobbyhorse war in Iraq on lies, grudges, and incompetence one day, sells it as crusade for Freedom, then turns around, drops and mouths the potent rhinohorn-stiffened economic cock of the Chinese the next. Don’t get the wrong idea, though. It’s manly, Texas-style dong-wrangling. It’s realpolitik.
And it’s enough to make your head spin. Rather than green vomit, though, words fountain out, splash and drip down the walls.
But hang on: the plot — convoluted and far-fetched as it already is — thickens. The Freedom Through Torture (Liberty Through Surveillance Department) gang wants Google to disclose information about its users. Google says “No way, we’re like totally not evil!” Almost the very next day, as they used to say in the fairy tales, Google then turns around and says “Hey, we’re totally going to censor search results in China, though! It’s not all that evil, right?” Are you seeing a pattern here, too?
Google is full of shit. The fact that they’re not the only ones does not excuse them.
And though there are a few weblog people out there saying “My little revenue-goo stream is not worth throwing in with this kind of thing,” the river of Goo shows little sign of drying up. Same thing goes for the investors, not surprisingly, and the marketing shit-alchemists know there’s no such thing as bad publicity.
So Andrew McLaughlin, who is Google’s Senior Policy Counsel, whatever that means, says:

Noted Large and Smart weblogger David Weinberger, who is indeed Smart, and Large in the sense that he is one of the brighter sources of light in our in our texty netherworld, and casts a long shadow in the cashosphere that has attached itself limpetlike to us over the past couple of years, well, he gives Google a bit of a pass, though he admits to ‘being torn’ in face of McLaughlin’s justification. Well, OK. It’s true that nothing is black and white. Grey is the new black.
In classic wonderchicken style, I’m entirely untorn, though.
Andrew McLaughlin is also full of shit. That’s no surprise — he’s a lawyer, right? But his artless waffle tastes a lot like Bush’s pet lawyer, Alberto Gonzales, helping to justify torture. But you know, only some torture. “Waterboarding, sleep deprivation, ‘stress positions’, psychological cruelty? Evil? Well, less evil than thumbscrews, castration, disemboweling, stuff like that, right? We’re totally all about the freedom and the democracy!”
Again:

What’s inconsistent with Google’s corporate motto — remember, it’s “Don’t be evil!” — is being evil, you asshole. Remember #6, from the ‘ten things’: “You can make money without doing evil.” This isn’t rocket science, and David Weinberger notwithstanding, it’s not complicated.
Google is a company, and more significantly an advertising company, and that means that the truth is that nothing can come in the way of whoring itself out for a sleazy but necessary buck or two. You have to keep your investors happy. It’s evil to get down on your knees in the filth and suck that cock in the back alley, then stab the guy and steal his wallet. It’s less evil to just drain the goo and let him stagger away. Yay! Everyone’s a winner, and you can rest easy, at least after you’ve scored some smack to keep the demon at bay. You have to keep your dealer happy. Not to mention your pimp.
Google doesn’t need to be in China. There are other search engines, domestic and international. The absence of Google is not going to suddenly deprive those poor Chinese citizens — the ones looking over their shoulder to see if the government is watching — of the ability to find information about washing machines and condoms. The only reason Google ‘needs’ to be there is the money. The sweet, filthy, repressive, execution-happy, police state money. Google wants growth, because that’s what investors want. Growth. Not the metastatic cancer cauliflower kind of growth either — they want those graphs pointing skyward, proud and erectile. They want to get in to China, build a foothold. And they’ll do evil to get that market share.
But there’s no actual need. No need to get down in the filthy alley in front of the Chinese government. Let Baidu have the money. Let someone else do it. You can make money without doing evil.
“Removing search results is inconsistent with Google’s mission, providing no information (or a heavily degraded user experience that amounts to no information) is more inconsistent with our mission.”
Let there be no confusion. Google’s mission is to make money. And holy crap, those Chinese have got some money these days.
Words have meanings. We’ve never been at war with Oceania. f–k you, Google.
[Update, long long after the fact (June 07 2006)] : ‘We were evil, Google founder admits.’ The ‘it’s only business’ apologists can commence to sucking my balls….. now.