Although trying to understand Google from the outside is a bit like examining a black hole, judging from the limited event horizon visible to outsiders it would appear that dear leader Sergey Brin is the individual who set the self-destructive China publicity stunt into motion. Not surprisingly, the Google vision tends to reflect the Manichaean values of co-founder Brin's idiosyncratic Soviet and American upbringing, even though the Cold War paradigm collapsed by the time he was in high school.

In the place of the bipolar world of Cold War certainties, we live in a more nuanced, multivalent world. But the rise of the Internet, while touted by never-say-die Cold Warriors as a tool to combat state propaganda, has inadvertently begun to serve up decentralized propaganda of its own; full of mindless mash-ups, advertising jingles, corporate slogans, recycled canned entertainment and de-contextualized information for disunited people.

Google has been innovative, and instrumental, in making fractured conversations, selfish self-regard, multimedia overload, and fragmented text the new cool.

But there are indications that this sort of cyber Balkanization works against social harmony and shared values, and instead breaks up the population into narrow niches and dubious demographics, much as data-mining does, creating not a more humane, integrated world, but a disintegrating tower of Babel where like-minded monocrats self-entertain while exchanging like-minded tweets, texts and trills without hearing, or heeding, the voice of others.

The author is a visiting scholar at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York.