July 23, 2002: Old Friends
This week a number of people have noted that if you enter the words Jake Dobkin into Google, the second or third result that is returned is Amol S[...]'s extremely long and sometimes very amusing account of the breakup of our friendship. Amol created the page a couple of years ago, during a period of post-friendship recrimation and ill-will. It records some very stupid behavior on both of our parts, and paints a rather vulgar picture of me in particular. Boy did I act like a jackass- no denying it. Back when Amol first put up the page, I was pretty upset. After all, Amol had already explained to me how Google could be used to embarass or get even with almost anyone (it doesn't work on the John Smiths of the world- there are too many results). To a certain extent, Amol is correct- after all, I'm not sure I'd hire the Jake Dobkin he describes in his prose.
Going back and looking at the page today, I noticed something interesting: although I haven't tried to contact Amol since last May, his account does not end there. It appears that someone, or a number of other people, have continued to reach out and touch him, and perhaps justifiably, Amol has assumed that these messages are coming from me. This, as he points out, is something straight out of Paul Auster. It's as if the bad blood between us created a phantom Jake Dobkin, who continues to haunt Amol S[...] even as the real Jake Dobkin has moved on to other things. For the rest of Amol's life, any time he receives an anonymous email or strange phone call, I can see him recording an entry in his log- until the point that the log is so long and detailed that this other Jake Dobkin is almost real. Strange, isn't it? I'm not sure who is worse off- me or him.
I'm surprised more people haven't written about this sinister side of Google- how it can be used to create a "Permenant Record" to follow someone around forever. A friend pointed out to me that given enough time, most people will have thousands of search returns tied to their name- a lot of baggage from the past. I suppose with that many entries, strategies like Amol's will be hard to execute. Until that point, however, I'm pretty much stuck with him. I can only wish him well and offer my assurances that I no longer bear him any ill will.
Comments
Upon self-Googling, there are too many Jennifer Chung's to keep track of, so I am safe. For now.
But I too cannot believe you've put up this entry.
Interesting. Delightful even. The prospect of the whole exchange, that is.
Not to turn your relationship travails into a trivial excercise or a cruel joke+theory, but a phantom Jake Dobkin would be intriguing indeed.
I also noticed the various guest book entries around Stanford that mention both Amol's page and yours. For example, from link
On the trail of Jake Dobkin
On the Trail of Jake Dobkin. A web project by Amol [...]. The most current version of this page about Jake Dobkin can be found at http://www.bluejake.com.
Jake Dobkin on Thu May 2 10:40:40 2002
I'd also like to note that Googling my name, while it returns many fewer hits than Jake's, returns citations for my excelent work at a variety of endevours.
Hey- the NY Times took my idea and ran with it- a good article about Google and personal privacy:
link
Those fuckers.
Did they give ou credit?
Not as such, no!
My favorite is typing a phone number into Google and getting Name, Address, credit history, yadda yadda information... It is an identity theif's dream... Not that I am an identity theif...
I noticed some odd traffic from France today in my site logs. It turned out that it was Amol (he comes up as domains like m96.net81-65-149.noos.fr- a search through past months revealed that he checks the site about once every two weeks).
In the page he keeps, he quoted my log post and wrote: "Ripples. So I guess JD keeps tabs on this page, as he has 'posted' a denial (not clear which acts in particular he's denying; see long list above). Who cares, I suppose. But of course, annoyingly enough, he has decided to put my name on his website. (Note that you won't find the contents of *this* particular page in Google, since it's polite enough not to mention his name. But one wonders why one bothers.)"
Amol is right about his name, so I removed it and replaced it with the same convention he uses on his site: "[...]". But to be totally honest, Amol neglects the two webpages he keeps at Stanford.edu and Postconsumer.com that both point to the page in question. Those pages do contain my full name, and are kept there solely to keep the page ranked in Google.
Again- all of this is water under the bridge. I wish Amol only the best.
I ran into some of this stuff recently and I got the chance to read it again. You know what? It's HILARIOUS. Thing is that it was all very serious back then. Then again, what's more serious than a split between two close friends?
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