Entry 5 - Ubermorgen.com: Google Will Eat Itself

( http://www.furtherfield.org/displayreview.php?review_id=362 , http://www.gwei.org/index.php)

Ubermorgen.com is a website of collaborative conceptual art projects by Hans Bernhard and lizvlx. The projects are presented in a "hackivist" style, with the main page extremely minimalistic, with a white background and black text, formatted like a command prompt. One project on the page that interested me was titled "Google Will Eat Itself". The project is a company that generates money through google ads on a network of hidden websites, and automatically uses that money to buy Google shares. In essence, as Google makes revenue from the advertisements, it gets bought out with those same funds.

I thought it was a very interesting work because of its parasitic nature. To me, it seemed like it worked in a way similar to Google itself. Google is taking over the internet with its use of ads that make money for itself and grow bigger based on the content of others. With Google Will Eat Itself, the content of Google is being used to make GWEI bigger, its tactics being used against itself.