We who laugh at the old joke that terrorists demanded millions or lawyers would be released one by one from their highjacked plane -- the humor being rooted in dismay over a litigious liberal activism since the 1960s -- may ponder uneasily a joint project of university law school clinics. Informing us of our online rights, the clinics’ Chilling Effects Clearinghouse was the brainchild of Wendy Seltzer, an attorney for the Electronic Frontier Foundation and a fellow with the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard Law School. She opines that Chilling Effects fights “the ungrounded legal threats that chill activity on the Internet.” But she was challenged recently when the Supreme Court held that her clinics’ clients Grokster et al, opposed by MGM et al, could be liable for copyright infringement when technology is used illegally to download songs or movies. 

Since these are largely downloaded by the “people” whose rights are all the rage in liberal academia, a big picture is reasonably inferred: Protect the “people” against mean-spirited corporations. Indeed, an anti-corporate rhetoric of the Democrats was proselytized on Seltzer’s blog of July 28, 2004, not to mention the fellow traveling MoveOn.org, when she gushed “I’ve doubled my contribution to the Kerry-Edwards campaign. If ten of my friends and readers respond, I’ll double again.” Naturally, the Electronic Liberation Front’s legal troops come from the ranks of Democrats who defend the Truth, whereas the rest of us do not “get it” and oppose those ideals. The ideals were exploited quickly by Google, Inc., whose motto is “Do no evil.” And evil is said by Google CEO Eric Schmidt, per Wired News on January 2003, to be whatever Sergey Brin says it is. Above all and incongruously, evil is any threat to the corporate profits of Brin and Larry Page, twenty-something geeks when they founded Google a few years ago and who are now billionaires. The threat bore increasingly on their use of dubious copyright material.

The final solution? A marriage made in hell of Google and Chilling Effects. Try to remove a website or image from Google for an alleged copyright infringement and you will just make them more popular because, like men disgraced publicly with posters around their necks that say they solicited prostitutes, your infringement notice will be posted publicly by Chilling Effects under a website heading which suggests that you tried to silence a competitor or critic. Moreover, whether or not your complaint has legal merit, your opponent will be assisted pro bono by law students at the clinics of Stanford, the University of San Francisco, the University of California at Berkeley and other republics of the people. A quite intimidating prospect that, bringing to mind the ad hominem tactics used by the politically correct, is intended to suppress legal disagreement before it starts.  

I am poignantly familiar with the idealistic rhetoric of universities, being myself a professor. And as a professor who teaches philosophy and encounters students who are self-proclaimed geeks, my initial take on their superciliousness was to construe them in terms of one of their heroes who presaged today’s sophism. They struck me as being postmodern children-of-their-time who lack a Dionysian element proper to human nature. This element, coined by Nietzsche, fuels a profound passion to create. Disconcertingly, the geeks in my classes have nodded smilingly when I put the most benevolent spin on this, noting that they tend to be devoid of any passion to productively shape the literature, theology, philosophy, art, architecture, or science of their culture. Certainly, they posses Nietzsche’s Apollonian element of cunning that is exercised by hacking. And the “hacking community” is self-avowedly represented in legal matters by professor Jennifer Granick who, being a wannabe Übermensch on this analogy, directs one of the law school clinics for Chilling Effects at Stanford.

Along with Ms. Seltzer, Jennifer Urban at UC Berkeley and other legal-eagle superpersons for whom the personal is evidently political, Granick makes it ever more clear that the culture war has taken a new turn. The turn retains, at least surreptitiously, all the usual agenda such as diversity, liberal theology (if theology must exist), gay marriage, and extramarital sex -- illustrated by her narcissistic blogs June 27-29, 2005, that are rife with fixations on “polite” versus “slutty” sex and her presumption that we and her students will want to know what she is reading: “WHAT I’M READING” -- “Sex and Sensibility edited by Genevieve Field” and “FAVORITES” -- “Short stories by up-and-coming (pun!) and more established formal writers.” Speaking of theology in her blog on February 8, 2004, she shares with us that she enjoyed the Lion King, although “the beneficent father-figure watching down from above... is all Judeo-Christian.” 

I encountered firsthand this legalese about the DMCA (Digital Millennium Copyright Act). My experience with a legal shell game at the carnival of Chilling Effects and Google inspires my criticism, not to be dismissed by the predictable ad hominem. I had sent a letter to Google in August 2004 asking it to delete one of my book’s images. The image referenced a website, the only site where the book was ridiculed for defending traditional religious belief and a belief in extraterrestrial life, when no other website image was displayed where it was accurately described. “Hi Robert,” replied an affable email: “In keeping with our policies, we are unable to remove [the image]... Regards, The Google Team.” Despite this Team allegedly using an Algorithm to impartially display websites and images, the other images suddenly appeared after not being shown since the book’s publication in 2001. Clearly, the Algorithm was bypassed by “tweaking” them on. Abruptly, days later, they were “de-tweaked” and the old image alone remained with the alarmist website listing under my name “Author Asks Google To Remove Link to Critic -- Chilling Effects Clearinghouse.”  

Google stated disingenuously that this added injury was justified because its removal instructions noted that letters of request, filled out on its downloaded notification form, were given to Chilling Effects. In point of fact, a “third party” was alluded to for mere notifications so that even the proverbial devil in the details did not warrant this carnival-hawker sleight of hand. In a sophistical email reply, Google recited my point as if it was proving what it had said.  

In being unresponsive and less than forthright, if not unfair and deceitful, do the director and her Team deserve to be posted on a defamatory website, similar to their own, as much or more than the people they post? An affirmative answer would be aggravated by their “cause” being used to justify purging the innocent. Including the innocent with the guilty, after all, would validate their need to protect the “people” by inflating the numbers of the people’s enemy. A database on Chilling Effects, in this regard, reminds one of a secular pogrom-like Index Librorum Prohibitorum. Ideological campaigns are always vicious parodies of the traditional religion they mock. Some old-time religion might enable these campus nomenklatura, drunk with their own virtue, to see the logs in their own eyes before their great leap forward to expunge the specks in the eyes of others.

Qualms about Chilling Effects are exacerbated by growing controversy over Google’s Algorithm. For it appears that, aside from Google “tweaking” websites it favors or frowns upon, the Algorithm is anything but value neutral in deciding the website exposure and fortunes of countless individuals and companies. Is it being used for a kind of “class warfare?” A website which cites this warfare and that has become an irritating nemesis of Google is Google-Watch.org by Daniel Brandt. He argues that a virtual warfare being waged on the people consists of privacy violations and a corporate commercialism -- worsened, one might add, by the fact that this commercialism proceeds pari passu with a marketplace moralizing of feminist agenda and the nanny culture. These trendy cultural fashions notwithstanding, the privacy violations are serious. Persons who fully use Google’s services have recorded on its databases their emails, where they shop online, their financial status, what they read and photos they surf, and areas of the world they locate on online maps -- in sum, their very thoughts by Orwellian inferences from their search terms and website selections.

Curiously, however, what is good for the goose is not good for Google. Google officials were “angered by a CNET article that revealed personal information on CEO Eric Schmidt obtained from Google searches,” reported EarthTimes.org on July 5, 2005. The searches provided his age, income of 1.5 billion a year, stock sales, personal address and liberal political activity such as hosting a $10,000-a-plate political fund-raiser for former presidential candidate Al Gore. In reaction to the article by Elinor Mills, Google “apparently instituted a policy of ‘not talking with CNET News.com reporters until July 2006’.” Mills acquired the information after spending a mere thirty minutes on Google’s search engine.   

The search engine being used by Google to amass information on you and I, conversely, is rationalized on two fronts. First, there is the intractable liberal dream, rooted in Rousseau and the Enlightenment, that there is no inherently evil aspect of human nature and that all conflict is due to ignorance of Nature and miscommunication. If our lives are open books in a technologically progressive society, there will invariably be understanding and peace. Recall a satire on this illusion when the prison warden in Cool Hand Luke said, just before torturing a recalcitrant prisoner, “What we have here is a failure of communication.” Second, there is the more sober confession that Google’s marketing and customer appeal is enhanced along with, of course, its corporate earnings. That the earnings are good, owing to what is good for Google being good for us, is disputed by Brandt who foresees that Google’s greed for ever more earnings, court subpoenas, government prying, and hackers with grudges against individuals will inevitably result in egregious abuses of the information.

The oxymoron of this uncharitable idealism is rooted in the hypocrisy of the counterculture. In SiliconValley.com on April 24, 2005, New York Times technical columnist John Markoff wrote “Dropping Out and Booting Up: Valley’s Countercultural Roots Still Shape Tech Debates.” He states that the bitter debates over file sharing that were addressed by the Supreme Court can be traced to a paradox that information “wants to be free” and “expensive.” Those who want the information to be expensive for advertising revenue, despite the 1960’s anti-capitalist revolution, include the geeks at Google. And those who want it to be free include the university lawyers at Chilling Effects. Their marriage, or shall we say cohabitation, raises a larger social question that is not entirely facetious: Are their unholy offspring being socialized paradoxically to be sociopathic? If persons who behave like sociopaths are typified by a narcissistic lack of empathy and fairness in their manipulations of the law, then the law’s morality will depend on moral people who are in a position of power to enforce limits.

It was warming to witness limits set by the Supreme Court, despite misgivings about a morality of many of its decisions, when it said “No” to elitist lawyers at their ivory-tower clinics. Their tech-law theories appear to have morphed from an atheistic legal positivism into a postmodern legalism, a.k.a. Critical Legal Studies (“Crits”), wherein relativistic legal paradigms deconstruct traditional moral norms in order to shape and reshape a politically correct cybernetic world. Their blogs indicate that the real world has temporarily triumphed but that, like little tyrants in university bunkers, their state of denial is mutating into damage control and revitalized delusions of legal grandeur. The grandeur mandates a little evil for a greater good. Would one good be for Chilling Effects to legally suppress its critics without having to post notices on its own website titled “Critics Chilled by Chilling Effects Clearinghouse?” But why would this good be needed if the Clearinghouse becomes omnipresent and its critics disappear, algorithmically? But hey, are we postmodern Biblical Jobs to question the mysterious ways of the legal geeks who are the brave new world’s electronic Way, Light, and Truth?
 
Robert Trundle is Professor of Philosophy in the Department of Social Sciences and Philosophy at N. Ky. University. He has refereed for the journals Philosophy of Science, Laval Théologique et Philosophique and Dialogue: Canadian Philosophical Review (official journal of the Canadian Philosophical Association).  His recent books include From Physics to Politics (2001), Camus’ Answer: “No” to the Western Pharisees (2002), and Is ET Here? (2005).

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