Eric Schmidt goofed.

It wasn’t a massive, loud goof. It’s not as if he dropped custard into the cleavage of the wife of the Russian Prime Minister or sat on a Saudi Prince’s priceless and beloved cat. But he goofed, all the same, in a very significant way.

He said it was Google’s policy “to get right up to the creepy line and not cross it”.

A lot of people have talked about this, and mostly their worries centre on where the Creepy Line is and whether Google has crossed it. Since Mr Schmidt routinely says things like “We don’t need you to type at all. We know where you are. We know where you’ve been. We can more or less know what you’re thinking about”, which is creepy as hell as far as I’m concerned, that debate is pretty much uninteresting to me. Plus also, while I love Google for some of the things they’ve done, I don’t much fancy the ASA/Google Book Settlement. In fact, I think it’s a nightmare of compulsory licensing and private lawmaking. I think their attitude to (other people’s) IP and their attitude to privacy are of a piece, a kind of wonky, unexamined Ultra-Free Market Collectivism.

All that aside, what I find revealing about Mr Schmidt’s comment is this: it’s the perfect statement of conventional corporate culture. It’s not “Don’t Be Evil” at all. It’s “Get absolutely as close to Evil as you can without having to acknowledge that you’re evil.” And here’s the thing about Evil: it is diffuse. It is nebulous. The trick with avoiding Evil is that you don’t want to be near it, because it will slosh over the side of the Evil Bathtub and get Evil Foamy Suds on your shoes. If you want not to be Evil – as you can see pretty clearly if you read the coverage of the Iraq War Logs released recently by Wikileaks – you have to create a buffer zone between you and anything which even looks as if it could possibly be Evil. You have to say: “okay, that, over there, that is Evil, and we are going to avoid it! We will allow nothing of it to contaminate us! In fact, we will arrange our organisation in such a way that contact with us weakens and vanquishes it! Boooooo to Evil!”

That isn’t Mr Schmidt’s line at all. Evil works, so while he doesn’t want to be actually Evil, he’s apparently happy to nuzzle up against Evil (or as he puts it, ‘creepy’) and learn from it. Don’t get me wrong: I’m not saying he’s a bad guy. He’s not. That’s the sucky thing about Evil. It works on good people too.

It’s not Come To The Dark Side. In this context, the Dark Side will happily come to you.

Brief thoughts this morning about trust and the internetz…

I tweeted last night about Nosh4Noah, because a Twitter correspondent in SA asked me to. It didn’t even occur to me to worry that the whole thing might be a hoax, but of course, as people did point out after I’d gone to sleep, that’s always possible on the internetz. In this case it would require that someone chat with me occasionally for a few months and then sting me. I suppose the return on investment would be adequate-ish. (I’m leaving aside entirely the fact that the person in question seems kinda awesome, because my grandfather the professional confidence trickster was totally five-alarm awesome, so much so that he occasionally conned the same hotel twice in six months. It don’t signify, as Flashman would say.)

But look, it also occurs to me that I’m in a trust-based business. I need to expand my readership and I need people to buy my books one after another and recommend them to friends. I need people to trust positive reviews, trust me over negative ones, trust friends’ recommendations and booksellers’ enthusiasm. I need them to trust that their time is better spent with my outpourings than in front of a games console or one of those really awesomely trashy TV shows I watch so many of myself.

While that gives me a strong motive to check my sources, it also gives me reason to exercise and endorse trust as a way of being in the world especially in low-consequence settings. If Nosh4Noah was asking for credit card details, that would be one thing, but asking for a bank-to-bank transfer, while a bit cumbersome, shouldn’t afford the receiving account any access to or much usable data about the remitting account.

In other words, unless someone has set up a bent bank – in which case, frankly, they wouldn’t be bothering with the likes of me – the only thing I risk by donating is as far as I can see my ten quid. I’m content with that risk for the reward – the possibility of helping Noah. In the charitable context, I like to do the job that’s in front of me – I do bits and bobs for Reprieve, I make donations to things which somehow feel right (like DebRA), and overall that pleases me and makes me feel I’ve improved the world a bit. I don’t generally give to animal charities, because there are people who need help, although I did (in memory of Douglas Adams, really) donate to save the Kakopo a few years ago. I do not tend to ask how it will all get spent and so on – although I eschew Oxfam because they seem to be determined to kill the second hand book shops by taking advantage of their charitable status to create a full-on competitor to small indie stores. They did promise to talk to me about it a while back, but on the day I sat there and waited and they stood me up and have never apologised, let alone re-arranged the conversation. So now I do my giving elsewhere, because – back on track – I feel Oxfam does not merit my trust.

As the digital environment merges more and more with the living world, we’re going to have a lot more trust issues. DRM protection of digital media is flat out impossible in the long run; an expensive boondoggle. That means people will have to act in a trustworthy way towards ebooks and their publishers and authors, and we’ll have to trust that that’s what is happening. There are already AR apps which will show you who around you is Twittering what, and effectively interface the real world with social media – which means a stranger could have access to a certain amount of information about you. You have to decide how much.

All of which is a long way of saying that I choose to trust. I’ve been taken for a mug a couple of times – most notably by a film director who shall remain nameless, but who still owes me three hundred quid for what he claimed was ransoming his laptop from a burglar who had stolen it with all his scripts, but which was I now rather suspect a massive drugs debt.

On the other hand, I have made money, too, garnered publicity and met extraordinary people, and been able to facilitate in small ways some truly magnificent things – of which I trust Nosh4Noah will turn out to be one.