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NewsvineGoogle is an evil cult staffed by crazy people. Well, maybe not evil. And now that I think about it, the people aren’t really crazy. But it is a cult, and it may well be bent on world domination.
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When you’re at Stanford, it’s hard to escape the overbearing presence of Google in the Bay Area. We may be insular here, but for most grad students, Google still seems to fall within the bubble.
Right now I’m living with a self-styled “Googler” (just saying that word left a bitter taste in my mouth), so I’ve gotten to experience the G-uggernaut first hand. In terms of life penetration, it’s pretty damn impressive.
My roommate eats almost all her meals at HQ, and her social life involves mostly people from the office (and often takes place at the office); she talks the talk and walks the walk — she even wears the G-clothing.
Yes, if you thought Stanford students were bad when it comes to relentless branding, Google is something else.
Now, wearing a Stanford-stamped hoodie around campus when you’re eighteen is forgivable (you’re young, lazy and devoid of anything approaching style). Traipsing around San Francisco, broadcasting your corporate servitude, is not. After all, people with real jobs can afford to buy real clothes.
But it’s my roommate’s self-G-dentification that disturbs me the most. It’s one thing to be a member of a cult; it’s quite another to walk around in your robes, cyanide-laced Kool-Aid in hand, head held high.
Some people think that only as a student do you get a restricted view of the world, trapped in the tiny bubble of your campus. The thing is, though, just because you leave doesn’t mean you’ve broken free. You can carry that bubble with you; it just G-shrinks until you suffocate and die.
Usually, said suffocation process takes a while, but Google has it down to a tee. They run your life. They provide you with everything you need: food, shelter, music, beer (but only on Fridays), games, a social life — even romance. Whatever you want, there’s no need to leave work.
(To be fair, while they may have drunk the Kool-Aid, devotees of the high church of Google still have a little of that post-millennium faux-irony thing going on — you know, where every observation is tinted with a hint of self-depreciation, as in: “Yeah, I know my life is run by a corporate machine, but can’t talk now, got to go and have G-fun.”)
There was a brief moment when working for the G-Man was cool, when the free food and toys seemed like the ultimate perks for a job that just involved not “doing evil.” But now I see the evil masterminds at the Googledome for who they really are: drug pushers, trapping their employees in an unending cycle of addiction and high earnings. As opposed to, say, a cycle of tedious research and poverty.
Actually, with its free food, its highly insular social life and the cultish obsession of its worker bees, the thing Google most reminds me of is grad school. Which, on reflection, probably explains why I hate it so much.