Google - the Uncompany

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"Living" and "dead" aren't opposites - they are descriptions of time stages. You're not "dead" before you're born, right? There's a transition from one to the other.

The opposite of "living", really, is "unliving". As any SF/fantasy fan will tell you, that covers a lot of territory - robots, golems, elemental forces, intelligent gas clouds, the Great Old Ones. Things that may think, and which people might interact with, but which are not "living".

Likewise, the opposite of "dead", really, is "undead". The life cycle for a vampire, or a zombie, or a ghoul goes from living to dead to... well, they can't back up and become living again, can they? So they instead become "!dead", or rather, "undead".

Which brings me to Google.

Google, as you know, as the company motto, "Don't be evil". So, you can argue that Google, as a company, has the goal of being "not evil". And yet... while we're accustomed to seeing good and evil as opposites, really, they're not. You can be "not good" without being evil, and you can be "not evil" without being good.

So, by analogy... if "living" is to "good" as "not living" is to "not good", then "dead" is to "undead" as "evil" is to "not evil".

In other words: Google. Company of the Undead. As Jonathan Coulton says in "Re: Your Brains":

All we want to do is eat your brains.
We're not unreasonable; I mean, no one wants to eat your eyes!
Does that not describe Google? Hmmmmmmm?

Gotta go - there's some guys in white coats here who say they want to say hello.

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