Google Will Eat Itself

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One of the things I picked up on Transmediale08 was GWEI – Google Will Eat Itself, a project by the UBERMORGEN collective that has a straightforward mission: “We generate money by serving Google text advertisements on a network of hidden Websites. With this money we automatically buy Google shares.'”Anyone can join this noble mission by becoming a shareholder of GTTP (Google To The People Public Company). Google itself has not been a big fan of GWEI: the project was actually removed from Google’s search engine (so that it was impossible to find it with Google), but after a few months it was allowed to appear again. The creators never received any proper information from Google about why they were banned and why the ban was removed.

Some of the folks behind GWEI have also been involved in Amazon Noir – The Big Book Crime, an automated piece of software that makes books available online for free by grabbing them page by page from Amazon.com by missusing the “look inside” feature. This was carried out by sending 5.000 – 10.000 requests per book. After this process the data was logically reassembled into pdf-format by the SIB-Book-Generator. “Amazon Noir was scripted as an internet-movie. The whole digital action (media hack) was carried out in the global massmedia, within the art world and on a highly sophisticated technical level in the clandestine matrix of our global networks.” Amazon USA, U.K., Germany and France were vulnerable targets. During the attack they transformed part of the Search Inside the Book technology to defend the rights of the copyright holders – without actually solving the problem. Over 3000 Books were downloaded and distributed through p2p between April and October 2006. In July 2006 Amazon France and Amazon USA threatend to litigate. The matter was resolved out of court October 30th, 2006. Amazon (USA/France) bought the Amazon Noir software for an undisclosed sum – both parties signed a non-disclosure agreement.

The law system definitely tries its best to shut down these projects. An earlier UBERMORGEN project, [V]ote Auction (a satire about campaign financing and free-market economics that billed itself as “the only election platform channelling ‘soft money’ directly to the democratic consumer”), resulted in multiple lawsuits in US, the total amount of paper that detailed these lawsuits weighted around 700 kilograms (!). James Raskin said about the project: “These people are just 50 years ahead of their time in seeing that the ultimate destination of the current [electoral] process is that everything will be for sale.” After lawsuit threats by the New York State Board of Elections and Chicago Board of Elections officials (and heavy-handed comparisons to treason), the site was sold on August 18th, 2000, to maverick Austrian entrepreneur Hans Bernhard, who re-opened it. The deal was brokered by legendary culture jammers ®TMark. On October 21, 2000, the company Domain Bank illegally froze the Voteauction.com domain, capitulating to authorities. Bernhard immediately registered the site as Vote-Auction.com with a non-U.S. company. On November 1st, 2000, Network Solutions (the for-profit company that administers .com, .net, and .org domains) violated international law by removing Vote-Auction.com from its root servers. See here for the story.