Google moved out of Stanford in 1999 into the Menlo Park garage of Susan Wojcicki, an Intel manager soon to be CEO of YouTube and a sister of Anne, the founder of the genomic startup 23andMe. Brin’s marriage to Anne in 2007 symbolized the procreative embrace of Silicon Valley, Sand Hill Road, and Palo Alto. (They divorced in 2015.) By 2017, Google’s own computer scientists had authored more of the world’s most-cited papers in the subject than had Stanford’s own faculty.1
Google’s founders always conceived of their projects in prophetic terms. An eminent computer scientist, Page is the scion of two Ph.D.s in the subject, and no one will deny, not even his mother, that his “PageRank” paper behind Google search is better than any doctorate.2 His father, Carl, was an ardent evangelist of artificial intelligence at Michigan State and around the family dinner table in East Lansing.
Brin saw the word “googol,” meaning ten to the one-hundredth power—an impossibly large number—as a symbol of the company’s reach and ambition. A leading mathematician, computer scientist, and master of “big data” at Stanford, Brin supplied the mathematical wizardry that converted the PageRank search algorithm into a scalable “crawler” across the entire expanse of the Internet and beyond.
By exploring search—what Page called “the intersection between computer science and metaphysics”—Google was plunging into profound issues of philosophy and neuroscience.3 Search implies a system of the world: it must begin with a “mirror world,” as the Yale computer scientist and philosopher David Gelernter puts it, an authentic model of the available universe.4 In order to search something with a computer, you must translate its corpus into digital form: bits and bytes defined by Shannon as irreducible binary units of information. Page and Brin set out to render the world, beginning with its simulacrum, the Worldwide Web, as a readable set of digital files, a “corpus” of accessible information, an enormous database.
As the years passed, Google digitized nearly all of the available books in the world (2005), the entire tapestry of the world’s languages and translations (2010), the topography of the planet (Google Maps and Google Earth, 2007), down to the surfaces and structures on individual streets (StreetView) and their traffic (Waze, 2016). It digitized even the physiognomies of the world’s faces in its digital facial recognition software (2006, now upgraded massively and part of Google Photos). With the capture of YouTube in 2006, Google commanded an explosively expanding digital rendition of much of the world’s imagery, music, and talk.
Accessed through a password system named Gaia, after the earth goddess, this digital mirror world and its uncountable interactions comprised a dynamic microcosm worthy of a googolplex. As Page put it, “We don’t always produce what people want; it’s really difficult. To do that you have to be smart—you have to understand everything in the world. In computer science, we call that artificial intelligence.”5
Homogenizing the globe’s amorphous analogical tangle of surfaces, sounds, images, accounts, songs, speeches, roads, buildings, documents, messages, and narratives into a planetary digital utility was a feat of immense monetary value. No other company came close to keeping up with the exponential growth of the Internet, where traffic and content double every year. Weaving and wrapping copies of the URLs (universal resource locators) of the Web in massively parallel automated threads of computation, Google’s Web crawler technology has been a miracle. By making the Internet’s trove of information readily accessible to the public, and extending its reach to the terrestrial plane, Google introduced a fundamentally new technology.
An ordinary company of the previous system might have sold access to this information or collected royalties on licenses for the software needed to reach it. By developing efficient and hassle-free transactional systems, optimizing its computer processing, and driving down costs as it expanded in scale, Google might have garnered massive profits over the years. As little as a penny a search on its forty-two-kilohertz (thousand-searches-a-second) find-and-fetch engine would produce some $13 billion of revenues per year, most of that falling to the bottom line. But as prices dropped, purchases would mount and accumulated profits would rise on the model of all capitalist growth.
Google, however, was not a conventional company. It made the fateful and audacious decision to make all its content and information available free: in economic terms, a commons, available to all, in the spirit of the Internet pioneer Stewart Brand, whose slogan was “Information wants to be free.”
Brin and Page were children of the American academy, where success is measured less in money than in prestige: summers of graceful leisure and research, and above all, tenure (America’s answer to a seat in the House of Lords). The denizens of the academy covet the assurance that whenever they venture beyond their hallowed halls, they are always deemed the “brightest guys in the room.” Google culture is obsessed with academic grades, test scores, degrees, and other credentials.
The Google philosophy smacks of disdain for the money-grubbing of bourgeois society. As the former engineering director, Alan Eustace, puts it, “I look at people here as missionaries, not mercenaries.” Google doesn’t sweat to supply goods and services for cash and credit. It provides information, art, knowledge, culture, enlightenment, all for no charge.
Yet, as everyone now knows, this apparently sacrificial strategy has not prevented Google from becoming one the world’s most valuable companies. Still in first place as of this writing is Apple, twenty years older, riding on the crest of the worldwide market for its coveted iPhones, but Google is aiming for the top spot with its free strategy. In 2006, it purchased Android, an open source operating system that is endowing companies around the globe, including itself, with the ability to compete with the iPhone.
Apple is an old-style company, charging handsomely for everything it offers. Its CEO, Tim Cook, recall, is the author of the trenchant insight that “if the service is ‘free,’ you are not the customer but the product.” Apple stores make ten times more per square foot than any other retailer. If the market turns against its products, if Samsung or Xiaomi or HTP or LG or Lenovo or Techno or Zopo or whatever Asian knockoff pops up in the market fueled by Google at an impossibly low price, Apple may slip rapidly down the list.
Google’s success seems uncanny. Its new holding company, Alphabet, is worth nearly $800 billion, only about $100 billion less than Apple. How do you get rich by giving things away? Google does it through one of the most ingenious technical schemes in the history of commerce.
Page’s and Brin’s crucial insight was that the existing advertising system, epitomized by Madison Avenue, was linked to the old information economy, led by television, which Google would overthrow. The overthrow of TV by computers was the theme of my book Life after Television. If Google could succeed in its plan to “organize the world’s information” and make it available, the existing advertising regime could be displaced.
Brin and Page began with the idea of producing a search engine maintained by a nonprofit university, operated beyond the corruption of commerce. They explained their view of advertising in their 1998 paper introducing their search engine:
Currently the predominant business model for commercial search engines is advertising. . . . We expect that commercial search engines will be inherently biased towards the advertisers and away from the needs of the consumers. . . .
In general, it could be argued from the consumer point of view that the better the search engine is, the fewer advertisements will be needed for the consumer to find what they want. This of course erodes the advertising supported business model of the existing search engines. . . . [W]e believe the issue of advertising causes enough mixed incentives that it is crucial to have a competitive search engine that is transparent and in the academic realm.
Steven Levy’s definitive book on Google describes the situation as Google developed its ad strategy in 1999: “At the time the dominant forms of advertising on the web were intrusive, annoying and sometimes insulting. Most common was the banner
ad, a distracting color rectangle that would often flash like a burlesque marquee. Other ads hijacked your screen.”6
The genius of Google was to invent a search advertising model that avoids all the pitfalls it ascribes to existing practices and establishes a new economic model for its system of the world. Google understands that most advertising most of the time is value-subtracted. That is, to the viewers, ads are overwhelmingly minuses, or even mines. The digital world has accordingly responded with ad-blockers, ad-filters, mutes, Tivos, ad-voids, and other devices to help viewers escape the minuses, the covert exactions, that pay for their free content.
Google led the world in grasping that this model is not only unsustainable but also unnecessary. Brin and Page saw that the information conferred by the pattern of searches was precisely the information needed to determine what ads viewers were likely to welcome. From its search results, it could produce ads that the viewer wanted to see. Thus it transformed the ad business for good.
According to Levy, Google concluded that “the advertisement should not be a two-way transaction between publisher and advertiser but a three-way transaction including the user.” But in practice, following its rule “to focus on the user and all else will follow,” Google made it a one-way appeal to the user.
Google understood that unless the user actually wanted the ad, it would not serve the advertiser either and would therefore ultimately threaten the advertising intermediaries as well. In the terms of Life after Television, the promise of the Internet under Google’s scheme would be that “no one would have to read or see any unwanted ads.” Ads would be sought, not fought. To accomplish this goal, Google designated its ads as “sponsored links” and charged only for successful appeals measured by click-throughs. They used the same measure to calculate an ad’s effectiveness and quality, forcing advertisers to improve their ads by removing those that did not generate enough click-throughs.
Levy tells the revealing story of the launch of Google Analytics, a “barometer of the world” for analyzing every ad, its click-through rate, its associated purchases, and its quality. Analytics uses a “dashboard,” a kind of Google Bloomberg Terminal, that monitors the queries, the yields, the number of advertisers, the number of keywords they bid on, the return on investment of every advertiser.
Google initially planned to charge five hundred dollars per month for the service, with a discount for AdWords customers. But as Google discovered, billing and collecting are hard. They raise questions of security and legal liability and put the seller in a less-than-amicable relationship with its customers. It is easier and cooler altogether just to give things away. An easy-to-use source of instant statistics on websites and advertising performance would readily pay for itself. Showing the superiority of Google ads and spurring purchases of them, Google Analytics was offered for free. It soon brought in at least $10 billion a year in additional ad revenue.
Google’s new free economic model has penetrated even its corporate lunch rooms, the company having made the remarkable discovery that a cafeteria can be far more efficient if it does not bother to charge its patrons. At first Google set up a system of terminals to collect money from its employees for their food. The system itself cost money, and it led to queues of valuable Google engineers wasting company time as they waited to pay. Cheaper and easier and altogether trans-capitalistically cooler was simply giving away the food. The company now serves more than 100,000 meals a day at no charge. And so it goes, through almost the entire portfolio of Google products.
In 2009, the Stanford philosopher Fred Turner published a paper titled “Burning Man at Google: A Cultural Infrastructure for New Media Production,” in which he unveiled the religious movement behind Google’s system of the world.
An annual weeklong gathering at Black Rock in the Nevada desert, Burning Man climaxes with a kind of potlatch. While some thirty thousand ecstatic nerds, some of them half-naked, dance and ululate below, techno-priests ignite a forty-foot genderless wooden statue together with a temple in the sand full of vatic testimonies.
Like Google, Burning Man might be termed a commons cult: a communitarian religious movement that celebrates giving—free offerings with no expectation of return—as the moral center of an ideal economy of missionaries rather than mercenaries. It conveys the superiority of “don’t be evil” Google, in contrast to what Silicon Valley regards as the sinister history of Microsoft in the North.
Burning Man’s website, like Google’s, presents a decalogue of communal principles. Authored by the founder Larry Harvey in 2004, the “10 Principles of Burning Man” would seem on the surface incompatible with the ethos of a giant corporation raking in money and headed by two of the world’s richest men:
Radical Inclusion: no prerequisites for participation.
Gifting: offerings with no expectation of return.
Decommodification: exchange unmediated by commercial sponsorship or advertising, which are associated with what is termed exploitation.
Radical Self-reliance: depend on inner resources.
Radical Self-expression: art offered as a gift.
Communal Effort: striving to produce, promote, and protect social networks, public spaces, works of art, and methods of communication that support human community.
Civic Responsibility: value civil society and obey laws.
Leaving No Trace: the ecological virtue that contrasts with industrial pollution and human taint.
Participation: a radically participatory ethic; transformative change, in the individual and society, can occur only through personal participation that opens the heart.
Immediacy: no idea can substitute for immediate experience . . . participation in society, and contact with a natural world exceeding human powers.
But Brin and Page see no contradiction between Burning Man’s ethos and Google’s. They attend Burning Man often, as does Eric Schmidt, whose hiring was allegedly eased by the knowledge that he was a fellow devotee. Google’s headquarters, Building 43 in Mountain View, is often decorated with photographs of the desert rites. The first Google logo bore a burning man stick figure.7
To the extent that Google’s founders profess religious impulses, this gathering in the desert sums them up. A critic might cavil at the stress on “art offered as a gift.” (Does it justify scant compensation for YouTube contributors and authors of blogs and books?) The celebration of communal effort suggests Google’s belief in the superiority of open source software, produced for no pay. Open source gives Google platforms a facile extensibility that casts a shadow over the projects of potential rivals. Meanwhile, Google cherishes secrecy where its own intellectual property and practices are concerned. Perhaps the liturgies of Burning Man simply reveal the sanctimony of Silicon Valley atheists at play.
Echoing the 10 Principles of Burning Man is Google’s corporate page presenting “Our Philosophy,” a guide to its system of the world in the form of “ten things we know to be true.” These ten principles, like Burning Man’s, seem unexceptionable on the surface, but each item harbors a subversive subtext.
Focus on the user and all else will follow. (Google’s “gifts” to the user bring freely granted personal information, mounting to the revelatory scale of Big Data.)
It’s best to do one thing really, really well. (To dominate the information market you must be a world champion in “search and sort” fueled by artificial intelligence; you must be, for the purposes of your domain, almost omniscient.)
Fast is better than slow. (Fast is better than careful and bug-free.)
Democracy on the web works. (But Google itself is a rigorous meritocracy, imposing a draconian rule of IQ and credentialism.)
You don’t need to be at your desk to need an answer. (Gosh, we had better buy AdMob, for mobile ads.)
You can make money without doing evil. (Academic preening that implies that “most great wealth is based on a great crime.” If fast and free covers a multitude of sins, Google is proud to compensate by running its datacente
rs with a net-zero carbon footprint through solar and windmill offsets.)
There is always more information out there. (Big Data faces no diminishing returns to scale.)
The need for information crosses all borders. (We are citizens of the world and Google Translate gives us a worldwide edge.)
You can be serious without a suit. (Denim disguise and denial for the supreme wealth and privilege of Silicon Valley; no stuffed suits need apply.)
Great just isn’t good enough. (We are casually great.)
As Scott Cleland and Ira Brodsky point out in their swashbuckling and passionate diatribe against Google, Search & Destroy, there is one supreme omission in this list of high-minded concerns.8 Nowhere is there any mention of the need for security. As they point out, Google discusses security on a separate page, and its chirpy PR tone is not reassuring: “We’ve learned that when security is done right, it’s done as a community. This includes everybody: the people who use Google services (thank you all!), the software developers who make our applications, and the external security enthusiasts who keep us on our toes. These combined efforts go a long way in making the Internet safer and more secure.”9
In other words, “It takes a village.” Security is at the heart of the problems of the Net, and in this case, Google is a source of problems rather than answers.
CHAPTER 4
End of the Free World
“These ads suck”
—Larry Page, posted on Google board, 2002
The Google world is a bounteous and providential kingdom. But it is still based on mediation through advertising at a time when many forms of advertising are in a slow but discernible death spiral.
As Jerry Bowyer writes in Forbes, “If advertising dies [as support for media], then what we call media dies too. The whole system which started with newspapers, moved on to radio, then TV, and then various forms of blogging and streaming is basically the same business model: Gather a bunch of people together who think they’re there for one thing, but are really there for something else.”1 It’s a bait and switch, and no one likes it. Despite all its heroic advances, Google still gets no less than 95 percent of its revenue from ads tied to its search engine.
Life After Google Page 4
