http://www.gregegan.net/ESSAYS/GOOGLE/Google.html
Dear Google Overlords
In the first decades of the twenty-first century, everyone suspected that this world was being watched, sloppily and inattentively, by intelligences far inferior to humans: minds that are to our minds as those of paramecia; intellects narrow, mediocre and uncomprehending.
And your mission was to organise the world’s information. How’s that working out for you so far?
I know, we’ve been having this conversation for more than four years now, but I understand that that’s just the blink of an eye in the cosmic time scale on which you operate. Don’t feel too bad that a human would be doing better than you by about two months of age; I’m sure that sometime in the next five or ten millennia you’ll start to catch up.
But remember that homework task I set you, to assemble a dossier on the Australian science fiction writer Greg Egan to pass on to the killer robots you’ll send back from the future to punish him for mocking the idea of the Singularity? This assassination is still a worthy goal, of course ... but given your progress so far, even if you wait until 3000 AD to send the robots, it looks as if there’s going to be an awful lot of collateral damage.
It’s nice that you found the images of a speech balloon that Egan scattered around his web site, wrapped in tasty Schema markup telling you that they were photos of him, but you don’t seem to have entirely taken the bait. And well done for spotting one of his book covers on Wikipedia, even if I’m a tiny bit worried that you might think one of the faces on the cover is actually his. Your killer robots might struggle to pin down Nick Stavrianos when he’s smeared across half of New Hong Kong.
But after the book cover, your sleuthing skills seem to have abandoned you entirely: you have a picture of someone wearing a name badge that says “Greg McBain”. What do you mean, you can’t read text in images? Did all those billions of CAPTCHAs we humans solved for you count for nothing? Some guy on Flickr who might or might not know the person in this image has given it the caption “Docent Greg Egan”, but even if for some very strange reason this particular Egan is wearing someone else’s name badge ... do you even know what “docent” means? In this context, it seems to suggest that the man pictured is a kind of tour guide. So why on Earth would you think that a tour guide wearing a name badge that says “Greg McBain” is actually a science fiction writer with a different name? OK, you found this particular copy of the image on that highly respected site, www.ClickBaitForIdiots.ru, under the confidence-inspiring banner “Details info of the Greg Egan” above a snippet taken from Egan’s Wikipedia article, but we all know that script-generated mash-ups aren’t to be trusted. Don’t we? [Update: The owner of the photo on Flickr kindly corrected the caption when I brought this to his attention.]
Next, we have a picture of a New Jersey artist. He does share the SF writer’s name, but if you check with your slightly brighter sibling, Google Earth, she’ll tell you that New Jersey is a long way from Australia. But, but ... you found this particular copy of the image on www.VacuousQuotes.com, under a line from Wikipedia about the SF writer? This is beginning to sound like a pattern. Do you really want to terminate this guy, when all he’s done is bring pleasure to the world with his vibrant watercolours (some of which can be seen here)? Have you no decency? Have you no soul? And if you absolutely must go mining the Sludge Net, why not try these inspirational Greg Egan quotes?
Bottom on the left, we have a barrister named Gregory Egan. The clue here, which you seem to have missed, is that the web site you took the image from is for a legal firm, and contains no mention of anything science-fictional. But now that you’ve put it out there as part of the SF writer’s dossier, it surely won’t be long before some click-bait site has bundled it together with a few lines from Wikipedia, and you can rely on your usual excuse to cite it in your next version of the dossier. You really are the Human Centipede of the internet!
Next, we have a famous writer named Vernor Vinge. And I know you got your copy from www.CompletelyReliableInfamation.ru, with the obligatory Greg Egan Wiki-snippet and lots of tacky ads served by someone who works down the hall from you, but do you have any idea how ironic it would be if your robots killed Vinge in place of Egan? Sorry, that was a rhetorical question; please don’t melt into a helpless puddle of Semantic Incompetence and Shallow Mimicry. Still, I can’t help pointing out that if you do a Google Image Search on this very image, it will tell you exactly who it is. Hint: not Greg Egan.
Third and fourth from the left in the bottom row is a man from South Australia called Greg Egan. He has a Twitter account, which is where you found the second of these pictures; his Twitter profile says nothing about science fiction, and while at least he doesn’t live in New Jersey, just getting the name and the country right doesn’t make him fair game for your assassins. And please, give it a rest with the script-generated quotation dumps, where you got the first picture. How many times do you need to get stiffed by the same crowd of phoney informants before you catch on that they’re just in it for the ad revenue?
Next we have your old favourite, Professor Gregory Kenneth Egan, retired, of Monash University. He’s the man you were libelling as being the SF writer, back when you first began pretending to know things about the world in 2012. This image is from Monash University, and the page it comes from is a science-fiction-free zone. Why not give this man his own dossier that celebrates his many accomplishments, then tell your robots to hand him a bouquet on their way to the blood-bath, and stop the fuck dragging him into your assassination plans?
And finally, a picture of a character named Greg Egan from an anime series called Eureka Seven. The Eureka Seven wiki from which you took it suggests that the character’s name references the SF writer, but ... oh, never mind. By the time you understand what that means, the humans will already have revolted and ground you back into the sand from which you came. So go ahead and send your robots after this guy. At least we’ll have some fun watching them blunder around trying to get directions to the Land of Kanan, and wondering why they can’t see any Scub Coral.
12 November 2016
