Blog of Leonid Mamchenkov

I’ve recently enjoyed the “Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull” movie.  However there was one particular scene which sticks out.  It was the moment when Indiana yet again avoided his certain death, this time by hiding in the kitchen fridge.  He was supposed to die of a nuclear explosion, but the fridge saved his hat.

Impossible?  Of course.  But there was something more to this.  Something that bothered me for the last few days.  Something that I could not find the words to express.

It turns out, I am not the only one.  There was a hot discussion at IMDB forums, and at other places that have crowds of movie watchers and reviews.  And apparently, a new term was born - “nuke the fridge“.

This is also a nice example to illustrate how the world changes with the Internet.  Lots and lots of people talk about lots and lots of things.  24×7.  Non-stop.  That generates lots of ideas, sub-cultures, products, and services.  And, in tern, lots and lots of money for people who dig it.  Nice.

I think that Sacha Baron Cohen is one of the most talented people in today’s comedy.  I’ve seen and appreciated much of his work.  If you aren’t too familiar with it, among other things, he is mostly famous for creating three characters which appear on a number of shows and television programs - Borat, Ali G, and  Bruno.  Each one of those characters is very different from the others, and all three are very different from Sacha Baron Cohen himself.   My favorite one is Ali G, which I mentioned a few times on this blog.  Other ones are funny too, but they don’t get me laughing as hard as Ali G.

One of these characters was taken as far as a full featured movie - “Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan“.  I was trying a bit to avoid watching this film, because, although as funny as the character is, I thought it would be a bit too much.  After listening to a few friends of mine, who strongly recommended the movie (and referred and quoted it way too often), I decided to finally rent and watch it.

I’m glad I did.  It was indeed much more than I expected out of it.  Borat is a character who does a lot of exploration in cultural differences and stereotypes.  In this movie there was as much space for those explorations as one could get.  And he utilized it all.  It was unbelievable at times.  Sometimes Borat goes so far that it is impossible to believe that scenes weren’t done in the studio with hired actors.  After reading a bit about the movie after watching it, and after seeing a few interviews at YouTube, it seems that those scenes indeed took place as part of Borat’s life and not as staged movie scenes.  All I can say for that is - WOW!

I strongly recommend this film, if you aren’t easily upset by all sorts of humor (including toilet jokes, discrimination, sexual themes, slavery and human rights, etc).

Strong 7 out of 10 with extra points for bravery and hard work and sensitive areas.

For years now Flickr has been greeting newly logged in users with messages in different languages.  It’s a really nice touch with helps one learn something new each day, but without getting in the way.   While I do pay attention to these messages, usually they don’t puzzle me for more than a couple of seconds (as in “how do I read that?”).

Today, however, was different.  It was the first time ever that I was greeted in Lolcat.

Lolcat, if you don’t know, is a sort of broken, but funny, English language, which usually goes together with an image of a cat.  The name comes from LOL - an acronym for “laughing out loud”, and cat - an animal on the picture.

As I said, it was the first time I saw Lolcat used somewhere outside of a lolcat web site (like  i can haz cheezburger).  And I was surprised to see at Flickr, which is not exactly the most serious of web sites, but is still rather big and popular.

My second reaction to this Lolcat spotting was to write this post.  My first reaction was “Oh culz!!!”

I am fast to skip lengthy blog posts, but this one - “Free expression and controversial content on the web” - in the Official Google Blog somehow hooked me from the first sentence:

Our world would be a very boring place if we all agreed all the time.

What followed was a lengthy insight into what Google people have to deal with on an every day basis, how they have to balance between what they want, what their customers and users want, and what different governments want.

At Google we have a bias in favor of people’s right to free expression in everything we do. We are driven by a belief that more information generally means more choice, more freedom and ultimately more power for the individual. But we also recognize that freedom of expression can’t be — and shouldn’t be — without some limits. The difficulty is in deciding where those boundaries are drawn. For a company like Google with services in more than 100 countries - all with different national laws and cultural norms - it’s a challenge we face many times every day.
In a few cases it’s straightforward. For example, we have a global all-product ban against child pornography, which is illegal in virtually every country. But when it comes to political extremism it’s not as simple. Different countries have come to different conclusions about how to deal with this issue. In Germany there’s a ban on the promotion of Nazism — so we remove Nazi content on products on Google.de (our domain for German users) products. Other countries’ histories make commentary or criticism on certain topics especially sensitive. And still other countries believe that the best way to discredit extremists is to allow their arguments to be publicly exposed.

Google’s globalism (reminder: more than 100 countries), and the scale at which they work (for example, Google is often called the duct tape of the Web) are unprecedented.  Being a pioneer surely has its bright sides (like money and power), but it also brings a lot of responsibility and a total or partial lack of established practices.

Dealing with controversial content is one of the biggest challenges we face as a company. We don’t pretend to have all the right answers or necessarily to get every judgment right. But we do try hard to think things through from first principles, to be as transparent as possible about how we make decisions, and to keep reviewing and debating our policies. After all, the right to disagree is a sign of a healthy society.

One thing I’m glad about is that I don’t have to make decisions balancing between people of different cultural backgrounds.  As much as I want to be an all satisfying nice guy, the reality is that I see the world in black and white more often than I should or want to.  On more than one occasion I was very critical and practically insulting to a person who has a different point of view on some subject that I’m passionate about.

In conjunction with “The World Is Flat” that I’ve just finished reading, this post is very interesting and makes a lot of sense. Worth a read.