There's a long list of movies that feature aliens who land on Earth to be welcomed with open arms by naïve politicians. The extraterrestrials infiltrate our governments, subvert our leaders and NRA executives, and then quickly start with wholesale slaughter and enslavement. Just a few examples are "Mars Attacks," "Earth Girls are Easy," "V," and the amateur documentary about my love life, "Devil Girl from Mars." The plots all have the same we-come-in-peace beginning, which quickly turns to bloody conquering, secret harvesting of our internal juices, stomping on Cringely's self-esteem, or stealing all the hottest women.
I submit: Google is employing the same strategy, ergo, Googlers too must be alien life forms. Probably from the planet Ogle.
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A few days ago, two of the mysterious Google barges, vessels that have no knowable purpose, pulled into the Port of Stockton, Calif., at around 2am. They were immediately welcomed with bleary-eyed ticker tape parades and pallets carrying free loads of whatever stuff the people in Stockton make. Another is heading for Portland, Maine, to oversee East Coast operations, while the fourth one evidently breamed back to the mothership.
"We think this will trigger an economic stimulus for Stockton," was Mayor Anthony Silva's response.
Jobs? Are you kidding me? Look what happened in San Francisco.
The Google barges parked there for only four years, and in that time it's gone from being a peaceful tourist destination and the capitol of spandex consumption to a chaotic cesspool of espresso- and cocaine-fueled debauchery orchestrated by being disguised as uncontrollably arrogant fratsters and Czech escort models who are able to befuddle the weak minds of venture capitalists in order to manufacture massive wealth out of thin air. They then use that money to weaken the populace with bread and circuses, moral decline, and utterly impossible app startups that promote lowered IQs and narcissism.
Bloated with these successes, they slowly infiltrate our other technology conglomerate executive suites. How else can you explain John Legere, Reed Hastings, Tom Wheeler, or Mark Zuckerberg? Whenever humans try to resist, Google simply exploits our weak-natured greed and throws elephantine sums of money at us like the $1 billion it just spent on oh-so-original game streaming service, Twitch.tv. Yeah, twitching is about all you'll be able to do when you're strapped into your matrixed bio-pod.
When the Googlians reveal themselves as the little green intergalactic sociopaths that they really are, it'll be too late. The Google barges will suddenly be exposed as vast recycled starships that use multidimensional Feng Shui to be bigger on the inside than they are on the outside. Their doors will burst open and out will pour an army of Googlebots that we've unwittingly built for them, and we'll be rounded up by the millions and enslaved to serve as Soylent ingredients or captive audiences forced to laugh at Eric Schmidt's closet standup routine.
That sucks, but when it happens, we've only got ourselves to blame. Google has been showing signs of evil machinations for the last several years as the reavers from the Google Galaxy have been unable to keep their nefarious natures under control, and we've done little or nothing. They've turned the Bay Area populace against each other with unnaturally comfortable alien buses just for laughs, and they've secretly plotted to pay their brain-controlled human workers less than they deserve.
Now it's been discovered that Google might be secretly controlling how webmasters can link to each other. By tagging links as "unnatural" Google has allegedly been scaring webmasters into removing links between sites that Google doesn't like. If they refuse to comply, the search ETs menacingly imply that they'll downgrade ranking or indexing. It's a completely gratuitous power grab, but it's supposedly been working with publishers removing site-to-site and site-to-content links. (Alien theories aside, if true, that's truly ripping at the soft, white underbelly of Internet freedom.)
And if that wasn't enough, Google has also embarked on a campaign to destroy our workplace productivity by turning our minds into time-wasting mush. First, it introduced an unnaturally addictive online Rubik's Cube, then it also leaked that it has acquired BYOD (bring your own doom) software maker Divide, which "helps" workers use the same devices at work that they use at home to slurp up Google's media propaganda and brain-devolving game apps. I mean really! The name alone should warn us: Divide. As in "Divide and conquer." Hello?! They're winning!
Don't kid yourself. They're coming, and they're coming soon. We need to throw off our brain shackles, take municipally-sponsored public transportation, and sink the Google barges before they turn the good city of Stockton into ground zero for the Android apocalypse.
This article, "Google begins world domination campaign by invading Stockton," was originally published at InfoWorld.com. Follow the crazy twists and turns of the tech industry with Robert X. Cringely's Notes from the Field blog, follow Cringely on Twitter, and subscribe to Cringely's Notes from the Underground newsletter.