The leviathan

Like Jonah in the belly of the whale, you cannot possess power. Rather, it possesses you. Google would do well to understand this.

One of the more interesting people I’ve interviewed is a man called Ali Allawi. Based in London, Allawi has the look of a haunted man. The former minister of trade and minister of defence in Iraq’s interim government, Allawi wrote a book called The Occupation of Iraq: Winning the War, Losing the Peace, which was hailed as the blueprint for achieving peace in that country.

Though I spoke to him in London a couple of years ago, I’ve never forgotten what Allawi said about power. Defining power as the potential to dominate, Allawi talked about power having a life of its own. He said: “Those who appear in possession of power are not in possession of power. Power is in possession of them. Power tends to dominate those who wield it because it has an inherent dynamic that feeds on itself and wants more and more. Those who are put in charge of it think that can control it, but in reality it dominates them. They merely become grist to the mill.”

Of course Allawi was speaking about political power, but what he said remained top of mind while I was writing about Google. Like politics, original intent often gets lost in business’ pursuit of dominance and profits above all else. In a capitalist world driven by extreme self-interest, benevolence is often consumed by power as the quest for growth surpasses every other intent.

The only thing that can balance or contain power is the division of power. When we spoke, Allawi talked not of checks or balances, but rather of the fragmentation of power, saying that power has a self-serving core that becomes a leviathan and must be weakened all cost. He added that power doesn’t allow for foresight, saying that foresight is an advantage people have before they are given the opportunity to exercise power. “Once you are in it, it is like a leviathan. Then the only way to deal with it is to fragment it, distribute it and turn it into something less like an ever-growing machine.”

In economic terms, what Allawi is referring to is some mechanism of self-regulation or self-cannibalisation that may seem like an anathema to capitalism. However, for monoliths like a Google that is growing at break-neck speed and already facing the Department of Justice on the Yahoo! deal, fragmentation makes sense. Instead of spawning products and buying brands that exponentially feed the power core, why not fragment into satellites of entrepreneurship that build local economies? Rather than consolidating wealth and dominance at the Googleplex, spin off myriad opportunities that empower and uplift entrepreneurs in emerging economies around the globe.

While Google has shown extreme prowess in technological innovation, it has yet to demonstrate ingenuity in economic constructs. Google’s pending patent for a floating armada of data centres may revolutionise server hubs by pioneering the way for cheaper, greener data centres that are powered by fuel-efficient wave electricity. But it’s hardly a panacea to poverty and the global greed that’s really killing our world.

The US economic crash shows that avarice has a toxic end tail that spreads poisons far beyond the reach of the destructive maw that spawns it. As Google’s tentacles reach deeper into China, India and Russia to complete its grip on the world, perhaps they could consider the legacy they’re leaving.

Instead of indexing a trillion unique pages that include nebulous content you’ll need more than one life time to consume and spawning products that offer Google even more of our personal and corporate information, they could invent a more useful machine. One that reconstructs power and profit as tools that build and uplift humanity.