Roxane Gay on Google's 'Deafening and Disturbing' Silence Around Their Deletion of Dennis Cooper's Blog

Roxane Gay throws her two cents to the New York Times about the case of the missing Dennis Cooper blog. "I never know what to expect when I read it, but I always know I will be provoked, challenged and intrigued," she writes of the blog. "Or, I should be speaking in the past tense." More:

When I contacted Google for further comment, I got a response that said, “We are aware of this matter, but the specific Terms of Service violations are ones we cannot discuss further due to legal considerations.” I asked about why Mr. Cooper’s Gmail account was also deleted and whether or not he would be able to retrieve the archive of his work, and I was directed to Google’s Terms of Service, Gmail Policy and Blogger Content Policy, which did not offer any useful specifics.

[...]

Google’s relative silence is deafening and disturbing. Mr. Cooper is reluctant to call this deletion censorship, but given the nature of his work that is what it feels like. Regardless, Google’s actions here suggest that some boundaries shouldn’t be challenged. That’s a shame. There is a wide range of art in the world, but there is an urgent need for art that pushes us and makes us uncomfortable because it forces us to think, to question, to give into it, to resist.

Later:

In 2004, when Google went public, its founders, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, wrote a letter to potential shareholders that, at the time, felt groundbreaking. It was something of a manifesto about running a company ethically and ambitiously. It was full of robust idealism including mandates like “don’t be evil” and “make the world a better place.” They made it seem as if it was possible for a large tech company to operate with a measure of humanity. It was a really nice idea.

What is far more disturbing than the transgressive work of Dennis Cooper is the cold reality of technological progress. The idea of a cloud benevolently storing our personal information, our work, our photos, our music, so much of our lives, is also really nice, but as users, we have no control over the cloud.

We surrender that control each time we write a blog post or log in to an email account or upload an image. The allure of all this technology is hard to resist. I use Gmail, Google Docs, Google Drive and of course, the Google search engine, all day, every day. I use other online services, like Dropbox and iCloud, as well. Even as I write this, I am using several Google services, though over the weekend, I downloaded my archives using the company’s takeout service, which is pretty handy, should you still have access to your Google account.

When we use their services, we trust that companies like Google will preserve some of the most personal things we have to share. They trust that we will not read the fine print.

Read it all at the NYT.