The Voice of Google

Google’s founders, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, were bona-fide public figures by then, and self-­made billionaires multiple times over, but in Charlie’s they were idols. They would often ascend the stage together, practically matching in sweat-wicking athletic clothes and Crocs. Larry had a dopey perma-smile, and seemed delighted by everything, especially Sergey. Sergey was the straight man, with a faint lilt, a product of his childhood in Russia, and an acrobatic build that made him look like he might launch into a handspring at any moment. Their charisma was unconventional, contextual; you had to be there. The audience of employees lapped up every word, giggled at every dad joke. During a Q. & A. portion of the proceedings, even adversarial questions were absorbed into the Google spirit—­it all melted into laughs, love. Merriam-­Webster had added “google” to the dictionary the year before. Fortune had crowned it the “Best Company to Work For” in America. Profits were, as the execs loved to boast, “up and to the right,” fuelled by an online-advertising machine that minted cash beyond Wall Street’s wildest dreams. But the company’s financial success felt almost incidental. What mattered, we told ourselves, was the mission—a conviction that technology could improve the world and that we were helping to build the future. The air in Charlie’s buzzed with collective belief. That first meeting was the only one I’d ever attend as a pure spectator. By week two, I was working the event—­cordoning off the Noogler section, handing out extra caps—and I soon began helping to draft bits of Larry and Sergey’s script. A portion of my time was spent supporting the P.R. team, and I started to pick up my first press requests, providing office tours to journalists eager to see the “Google experience” firsthand. I studied a “master workplace talking points” document, which was maintained with input from PeopleOps, which was Google-speak for human resources. This was the era of “bringing your whole self to work,” of shiny, smiling H.R. people doing press hits about the importance of valuing employees’ authentic personhood (always with a telling corollary: “Because that’s how people do their best work!”). I was required to attend a training on “conscious business” with a guy named Fred Kofman, an executive coach whom Sheryl Sandberg credited with shaping her “lean-in” ethos. The course was, theoretically, about living one’s courageous values, but its most salient lesson was that employees should take “unconditional accountability”—which, in practice, sounded a lot like never questioning the higher-ups. The message reiterated over and over was that there were two kinds of people in the world: victims and players. You wanted to be a player at all times. Despite the lore, Google’s offices didn’t make a big first impression. The bulk of the campus had been quickly converted after its previous occupant went down in the fallout from the dot-­com bust. The result was a complex of squat, one-­ or two-level buildings with metal and glass siding, surrounded by a moat of parking spaces, with Google signs plunked into the dirt out front. But there were plenty of amenities to point out—­the massage rooms and nap pods, the dinosaur fossil, the wacky sensory-­break touches like ball pits, swings, and yoga balls (even if no one actually seemed to use them). Foreign journalists seemed more skeptical than their American counterparts of perks such as lunch-­break haircuts or on-site laundry rooms, which I’d heard described as letting Google be your “housewife.” “Z is is all a big plot to control ze workers, no?” a French reporter said. At that point, though, I was still learning to see Google through Google’s eyes. I learned to deflect these kinds of questions and pitied the askers, a little bit, for their cynicism. No one else seemed eager to send out a weekly “Here’s how to tune in to TGIF” e-mail, so I volunteered to do it. I kept the notes straight at first, but soon began injecting more voice, writing things like “As the week folds gently in on itself and we collectively blink at the passage of time, we arrive—inevitably, beautifully—at TGIF. Also: beer.” The messages were casual, sly, a little irreverent—­proof that Google wasn’t like any other company—while always amplifying the corporate mythology. I wrote about whatever products and feature updates we’d be spotlighting onstage that week as “epistemological experiments” and “peak experiences” in the pursuit of “Meaning and Truth,” and cast the executives appearing alongside Larry and Sergey as visionaries, prophets, and sages. T.G.I.F. was the weekly pageant in which the company talked to itself, but my e-mails became an important companion piece: folklore and fan fiction, the refrains of the gospel. Employees began to look forward to them. Every week, the moment the T.G.I.F. e-mail went out, an internal forum called Memegen exploded with reactions to what I’d written. One meme was captioned, “I want whatever Claire Stapleton’s on when she’s writing the TGIF emails.” Another christened me the Bard of Google. At Charlie’s, a group of engineers presented me with a wooden plaque naming me the company’s poet laureate. When I was promoted to manager, my performance review credited my “cult following.” This voice-of-Google thing—­a code I’d cracked for generating corpspeak with personality—­slowly became a hot commodity. The company relied heavily on the rhetoric of “culture” to keep tens of thousands of workers energized, giving a hundred and ten per cent. If work was going to be like a family, then it had to sound like one—maximally friendly, quirky, virtuous, Googley. So, in early 2011, when Larry Page became the C.E.O., replacing the veteran tech executive Eric Schmidt, I was looped in to help craft Larry’s internal messaging. Eric had pontificated plenty, but Larry was the epitome of techno-­optimism: Google wasn’t just going to organize the world’s information, he maintained; it was going to solve humanity’s biggest problems. In 2013, he launched Calico, a health-care company focussed on extending the human life span, and Time magazine ran a cover story with the headline “Can Google Solve Death?” “We need moon shots,” Larry would say, big, world-­changing ideas and initiatives, to make employees excited about innovating again. (Curing cancer wasn’t necessarily a moon shot, he once suggested, since it would only extend the average human life span by about three years.) His aphorisms stacked up like motivational posters in a middle-school science classroom—“Have a healthy disregard for the impossible,” “If you’re not doing some things that are crazy, then you’re doing the wrong things”—but Larry seemed to experience them all as fresh revelations, and he expected them to invigorate the workforce in turn. He loved to tell a story about how he’d read an autobiography of Nikola Tesla when he was around twelve, and cried—­he really emphasized the crying bit—­because Tesla died poor. (This, I guess, taught him the all-­important life lesson “Commercialize those inventions.”) “Computers should do the hard work,” Larry would repeat, so humans can get back to doing what humans do best: learning, living, and loving. Larry reorganized the company around a handful of key priorities, the biggest being that every product at Google should become “social.” He tied twenty-five per cent of employees’ annual bonuses to the company’s success in pushing this agenda. Hundreds of handpicked engineers, a clear first-­class citizenry, were moved into a secretive, newly renovated building in Mountain View. A lush living wall, said to boost brainpower and creativity, reinforced the sense that the workplace itself had been engineered to optimize human potential. Meanwhile, Larry’s examples of how to implement his vision were utterly banal. The centerpiece of his plan was a new social-media network, code-named Emerald Sea, that would eventually launch as Google+. It was a defensive move, not an inspiring vision—­Google worried that newer upstarts, like Facebook and Twitter, would steal our enormous internet lunch and become everyone’s portal to the web. Google+ was supposed to help us really “know” our users, which, in turn, would help us better target them with advertising. It wouldn’t be long before, say, Google Maps could serve you up a coupon right when you walked into your local CVS. This was groundbreaking stuff—a vision that ceding all of one’s personal data to Google would really feel worth it. The stock price went up and up and up. There were signs that Google was becoming bloated and inefficient, with multiple teams, for example, working on smartwatches simultaneously, as Googlers pointed out at one T.G.I.F. (In the end, none of these attempts could best the Apple Watch.) Larry said, blithely, that chasing the competition was a death knell, and yet that seemed to be all that we were doing. “We need to put more wood behind fewer arrows,” he often said, regurgitating an old Valley maxim. The trouble was, the arrows kept multiplying—appearing from nowhere, whizzing in every direction—and even Larry couldn’t seem to contain them. Google+ was a short-lived flop, but the spin was relentless. The platform had hit ten million users just two weeks after an invitation-­only launch, Larry boasted. By the fall, the number was forty million, and by early 2012 more than twice that. What Larry didn’t say was that many of those “users” had been been virtually forced to create accounts when they signed up for other Google services. The engagement numbers were dismal. When the platform was sunsetted, in 2018, Google admitted that the average Google+ user spent less than five seconds on the platform per visit. The place was a graveyard of auto-­populated profiles, a digital Potemkin village. In the crusade to make everything social, Google ended up destroying one of the few genuinely social things it had ever made: the RSS-feed aggregator Google Reader. Reader wasn’t glamorous, but it had a passionate following. It was small, by Google standards (and only by Google standards), with a reported thirty million or so users, many of whom were active daily. It was, by far, my favorite Google product, the one place I actually “socialized” online; I used it every day to read stuff on the web, share links, commiserate with friends. I saw a Googler on Hacker News say that the killing of Reader was the “Elves leave Middle-Earth” moment. Memegen was flooded with snark: We can bankroll a delusional moon shot to beam internet from balloons (Project Loon), but we can’t keep a few engineers on this? My own growing skepticism started to bleed into my T.G.I.F. e-mails. The messages started coming out half liturgy, half parody, depending on how you looked at it:

If an alien walked into an art museum, wouldn’t it think the abstract paintings were done first, thousands of years before the Renaissance? . . . step right up for a Lacanian mirror-­phase-y TGIF, where everyone comes together to blink furiously at the reflection and chant: “This is what Google looks like.”

There were other ways that the company’s power structures, and my own precarious place within them, began to come into focus. In the summer of 2012, I transferred to work at Creative Lab, a coveted New York-based studio that produced some of Google’s major ads. My boss there, Kevin, dressed like a little kid—­T-shirt, cargo shorts, low-­top sneakers—­and had a boyish crew cut to match. The only tipoffs that he was pushing forty were a sallow, hangdog facial expression and Nosferatu-­esque under-eye bags. He used the word “shit” a lot: We just make shit. We do epic shit. During our first and only meeting before I was hired, he barely discussed me, my work, or how he envisioned that I might fit into the Lab, though he did say, with a perceptible note of admiration, “You clearly get the Googley shit.” I was an emissary from, or maybe a totem of, Mount