Desiring Machine

Well it seems Google is becoming a victim of their own success.

And that is the problem with becoming a cultural phenomenon. The law ceases to protect you. What is happening to Google is what Gilles Deleuze would call a deterritorialization or line of flight.

“Multiplicities are defined by the outside: by the abstract line, the line of flight or deterritorialization according to which they change in nature and connect with other multiplicities. The plane of consistency (grid) is the outside of all multiplicities. The line of flight marks: the reality of a finite number of dimensions that the multiplicity effectively fills; the impossibility of a supplementary dimension, unless the multiplicity is transformed by the line of flight; the possibility and necessity of flattening all of the multiplicities on a single plane of consistency or exteriority, regardless of their number of dimensions.”

~ Gilles Deleuze Thousand Plateaus

The semantic disruption of Google is possible because of its multiplicitous nature. Googling is a nomadic experience. A process by which one moves adrift through the chance encounters of reality and linguistic relationships that bind them together. The network that Google corporation glues together traces out the very grid that we live within. In a word Google has become ours because it has weaved together through its tapestry of search algorithms, technologies, and interstitial existences the very fabric of our being. When you become that co-aligned with the grid you no longer continue operating as a separate autonomous unit of being. Your identity is lost, you become nomad.

It is remarkable the rhetoric and logic of ownership, trademark, and corporatism. To presume that things are fundamentally discrete and can be owned, or even that language can be owned and controlled because it is part of a brand. Rarely is it mentioned that Google is the product of us. What is compelling about Google is that it weaves together the products of our being, whether they be blogs, news, video clips, webpages, text, audio, utterances and disclosures. That is the soup of life and tapestry of our weaved web. Google owns it no more than you or I own it. It is a territory that defies territorialization. And Google, being successful in providing the services that effectively allow us to traverse this web, finds that their brand has become something that they no longer really have any control over. And so goes the logic of control when confronted with the force of deterritorialization. Google is a line of flight that traces, it is no longer a stable place, entity, or idea.

Hey Google, I got your google right here!