What Tech Takes

Risk, connection, diversity—Google Image Search takes them all

“Chinese Restaurant” by John Sloan, 1909

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A scene: two young women are out for dinner. They’ve branched out, and visited a Chinese restaurant—maybe in the heart of Chinatown. Not too fussed about what they eat, they order one of the set menus. After a few minutes’ catch up, the first dish is brought out—steamed dumplings, each delicious white ball impressively emblazoned with a red Chinese character. Trouble is, they can’t actually remember what on earth is meant to be inside the things, though they guess that the red lettering is meant to tell you. After a couple of tentative prods, they call over one of the serving staff. His English isn’t much good unfortunately, and some highly amusing gesticulating ensues. The universal language of charades kicks in, and, amid much hilarity, impressions of chickens, cows, and (somehow) shrimp are performed. The girls fall about laughing. It’s a story they often refer to in the years afterwards.

Another scene: three old friends have been out for a catch up. After a few beers, they realise they’re ravenously hungry—they all thought the others were going to have eaten before they came. They wend their way from Spoons into the town centre, to a well-known cluster of food trucks. After much debate, they settle on a new cuisine—why not? Eventually (and after what seems like far too much money), their food arrives and they go to grab some sauces, but they’re all either unlabelled or unfamiliar. One looks pretty appetising, but they’re not sure how spicy it is. They ask the chef in the food truck: “very spicy, very spicy,” he says. But back home, he says, everyone eats it. They ask him where home is, and soon they’re treated to the full back story. He shows them pictures of friends and family, talks about his business. After this, they all come back regularly.

A final scene: two removal men are carrying an impressively upholstered wingback armchair up a flight of stairs. It’s covered in a pattern based on the broad, pleasingly shaped leaves of a monstera deliciosa—a Swiss Cheese Plant. A young woman who lives in the building steps out of the door of her flat and sees it. She’s an adult with Down’s Syndrome, who has just finally started living independently, and is taken with a new sense of agency in her life. She adores the pattern, and decides immediately that she wants clothes just like this chair. But she doesn’t know where the pattern came from, or what the plant on it is even called. A little nervous, but determined to find out, she asks the removal men where they’re taking the chair, and hops up the stairs to the intended flat. A knock on the door, and she meets her new neighbour. Thankfully, she’s just unpacked the kettle and invites her in for a cup of tea. Swiftly, they are good neighbours—eventually, they become good friends.

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I have just taken you to some possible worlds.

None of these scenes are drawn from real life. They are all the premises of ads for Google Image Search—a nifty feature on the search engine, also known as “Reverse Image Search”, which lets you just drop in a photo which has piqued your curiosity, and find out what on earth it is you’ve been looking at.

These ads (and there are a few others) don’t seem to be available to watch anywhere at will online, but they pop up a lot whenever I use YouTube now, so perhaps you’ve seen them. If so, you’ll know that they end rather differently to what I imagine above. In the first scene, there is no hilarious game of menu-based charades—one of the young women simply snaps a photo of her embossed dumpling and Google tells her what it says. In the second, there is no exchange with the food truck chef about his array of sauces and their origins—the cosmopolitan gang of friends simply whack a photo of the sauce in the search bar to find out what they’re dealing with. In the third, the woman with Down’s doesn’t ask her neighbour about her interior design choices—she just nabs a pic on her phone, uploads it to Google Search, and orders a jumpsuit with the leaf pattern.

These ads have appeared again and again for me in recent weeks. In each one, I could not help but wonder how the scenario would have played out in the absence of the smartphone. Perhaps the alternate realities I’ve imagined above are a bit idyllic—maybe the Chinese restaurant staff would have been cantankerous and unhelpful; maybe the food truck chef would have lied and told them it wasn’t spicy at all, just for a mean-spirited laugh; maybe the girl’s neighbour would have been an accomplished Icelandic abortion doctor responsible for the eradication of Down’s syndrome in her country, and appalled by the girl’s very existence. These are all possibilities.

And yet the potential pleasantness of these interactions is besides the point. They would have been real interactions with the human beings who were actually placed in front of (or at least, near to) the people in these ads. We never know exactly how interpersonal interactions with real life strangers are going to go—they are full of risk. We are not the lead characters in the video game of our lives who can predict what all the NPCs will say.

But things full of risk are also full of promise—and even when the promise does not deliver, the acceptance of risk is good for us. In a piece we ran last week at Ad Fontes, the journal of which I am Senior Editor, my colleague Nathan Johnson unpacked Simone Weil’s 1943 work The Need for Roots. Weil there lists what she calls “the needs of the soul”—the things a healthy society should provide for people. There were things I expected there like equality and liberty, but I was surprised to see “risk” among them. It took me thinking about these ads to understand what Weil might mean though. A humane society, in which we are forced into fellowship with others and compelled to consider our obligations to them rather than simply assert our rights against them (another of Weil’s big ideas explored in Nathan’s piece), is one in which we must run the risk of awkwardness and rejection. Yet the rewards of facing such risk are evident: we build bonds, fulfil obligations, show love, all of which meet needs in our souls. And even when this doesn’t work out, the risk itself is a need met.