Pam Omidyar, let’s make a casserole of Sergey Brin! (Chapter the Second of “Eat the Rich & Share the Wealth”)

January 31st, 2010

In this,

the latest installment

of my new book “Eat the Rich & Share

the Wealth”, we are going to baste and roast

a tender young Russian-American, Sergey Brin.

Sergey has over fifteen thousand million American dollars,

which is a very lot, and he has had that kind of money for

a long time. Because he is so young, and has been

so well fed for so long, he should

make a tender meal.

Let us see.

Sergey

came to fame as one

of the two founders of Google,

a nice little company which created a search

engine which is inferior to Clusty, and some really

cool stuff like Google Earth and Google Maps, and some

really yikes-tarded things like the Nexus One, which makes an

iPhone look like, well, an iPhone. He would like to have every single bit

of personal information about you and your friends and your life,

so that he can fatpipe some more advertising your way and get

fifteen thousand thousand million American dollars. In

return, he promises not to ever do anything evil with

your info. The definition of “evil” is comically

malleable for Sergey, alas, but never

mind that for now.

Other things

are vague for Sergey, too.

Like any self-adoring person who has

more money than God and wants to get forty-four

times as much money as God without angering Her, Sergey

makes a little show of doing good things. A year and a half or so ago,

he and his fellow barons at Google decided to celebrate their

own ascension to the throne God formerly

occupied, and they announced the

10 to the 100th

Project.

They asked

the world to submit ideas

for improving the world. They said

they’d throw a bunch of money at these —

well, $10,000,000, which to Sergey and his partner

Larry Page is like a dried-out raisin on the floor of the hangar

that houses their personal Boeing 767, but hey, still. They gave dates for

ending the contest. Those dates got waffley, as in “in the future, sometime,

unless there is no time, which is what Lou Reed sang, so thank you and

never mind”. Eventually they mumbled something vague about

cheering on social entrepreneurs and encouraging science

education, said everyone who had participated was going

to receive some good “karma”, the world went

“Huh?”, and everyone went back

to what they were

doing.

See, what

happened is that Sergey

and Google used this “project” to suck up

over 150,00 of the best ideas in the world, and now

they’ve quietly set about monetizing the real gems to further

enrich themselves, without telling the world what they are, or awarding

the $10,000,000 they originally promised, or otherwise maintaining

any fidelity to the originally announced contest

or, you know, ethical

principles.

But that

is the sort of thing

you can do when you have

fifteen thousand million dollars, see.

Another thing you can do is fly into a disaster zone

in one of your many jet airplanes, kick some water bottles

down the steps, take a picture or two of the suffering below, and

announce something wise, like “It was a terrible thing, but the people

are bucking up, yo!” Sergey was kind enough to do this in Haiti, where he

took a few pictures and then gave this advice to the world on his awesome blog:

“It is necessary to scale up the provisioning of shelter, food, water, sanitation,

and health care by at least an order of magnitude”. Also, he said, we should

put all the people in big tent camps near the airport so it’s easier to

pass out all that survival crap. Then he got back in his jet and

went back to selling boner-pill ads and

getting a financial leg

up on God.

Sergey,

I bet you are a nice

chap. But you are insincere.

And you have bad manners when it

comes to communicating with others less

God-like than yourself. I have been trying for a

very long time to communicate with you about this idea

I, a social entrepreneur, have about scaling up the provisioning

of good (and survival crap) in the world by orders of magnitude. It’s called

EarthNationLive, and you can read about it here, or watch it here on your

very own YouTube. You could have read about it in the sixty-eleven

thousand emails I’ve sent you and Larry Page and Larry Brilliant

and Eric Schmidt and Google.org and yadda yadda yadda

asking for a lil’ help over a period of many years, or in

my entry to your Let’s Celebrate Ourselves to the

100th Contest, but I don’t think you did

because I never heard from you.

Like a whole bunch of

folks with big

ideas.

Now that

you know who I am

and are reading what I write

to people like you — which a whole

bunch of you tech billionaires seem to be

doing since I chided poor Pam Omidyar for being a

hypocrite yesterday – please take a look at it. It’s a big music-y

social networky / Wiki-y / YouTubey / emailey / VOIP telephony / commerce-y /

order of magnitudey thingy for making the world work better. It aims to make

use of a bunch of these cool digital tools guys like you create to make money

to make good instead.  Like getting aid out to people in a way-organized

and way-quick fashion so that they don’t knife each other and lose

their arms and legs to infection.  You know, the people

in the tent camps by the airport where you

sometimes land one of

your jets.

Maybe you

could break off ten or a hundred

million of your teens of thousands of

millions of dollars to help get it underway.

(Ten, a hundred, what’s the difference to you,

really?  “None at all!”, you say?  Ain’t it a hoot to say

that?!)  No, I don’t want to run it on your servers, I don’t especially

trust you. No, you can’t control it for advertising or content purposes. It’s for

the “real” kind of good, not the “fake but it makes us look good and make

more money” kind of good. But it would be a real feather in your

cap to contribute, which would be better than

some of the fake feathers you’ve

been stuffing in

there.

All who

are really dedicated to the

earliest possible attainment of economic and

physical success for all humanity — and thereby realistically to

eliminate war — will have to shift their efforts from

the political arena to participate in the

design revolution.

…

Corporations

are neither physical nor metaphysical

phenomena. They are socioeconomic ploys — legally

enacted game-playing — agreed upon only between overwhelmingly

powerful socioeconomic individuals and by them

imposed upon society and its

unwitting members.

R. Buckminster Fuller

coming:

the overwhelmingly

powerful

miser!