Google doesn’t do evil, but it is creepy

There was something about the single man pool scene that summed up my experience visiting Google. Maybe it was the overly indulged corporate culture that this scene smacked of, like something Oliver Stone had dreamed up, but it had a mildly sinister quality to it.

This is not to say that Google is any more creepy than the culture at any other massive corporation, it’s just that at Google you have constant self-conscious reminders that they’re different, not like other companies, that makes it all a little weird.

When you enter Google you under are strict instructions not to take photos. This is a relatively common request within companies, but the disconcerting element is the accompanying Google security guard in a colourful Google jacket, following you around, radio crackling, to every new room you enter.

As part of a visiting group of international journalists we were given lectures from Google News and YouTube which were well-meaning and relatively informative, but were made up of nothing we couldn’t have, well, Googled ourselves.

On issues of content they assured us that we are the content makers, that they’re not after our jobs, and that their role is to merely help people get better access to our websites.

This may well be all true, and contrary to popular belief, as a News Limited journalist I don’t have a dislike of Google News, just a justifiably critical eye.

But on the issues of real interest to journalists - those which involved Google as the subject of news stories - there was no desire to talk.

For instance, you couldn’t get an on the record comment from anyone about the China hacking story or about the story’s fallout with the Chinese Government, which at the time was one of the biggest news stories in America.

Then there’s the tour. 

In the words of my guide, Google likes to think of itself as having “a college atmosphere”. The Google headquarters isn’t an office it’s “a campus”.

There is a life-sized model of a T-Rex skeleton on Google’s grounds, a remainder from the office’s former life as home to a digital modelling company that worked on Jurassic Park.

We’re told to “check out the dinosaur” in a manner reminiscent of the way David Brent brings the toy monkey in the office to the new guy’s attention. Can you believe this wackiness? We have a dinosaur, man!

But working in newsrooms, where odd Aztec-style death sports have been developed for the right to use the last of the milk in your instant coffee, being shown around Google’s staff facilities is awe inspiring for journalists.

Being led through nap rooms, onsite doctors surgeries, volleyball courts, cafes full of foosball tables and the aforementioned pools we must have looked like a group of little match stick girls, being briefly shown a life that we shall never know.

While half of me was having the intended response to the facilities tour – “isn’t it just great to work at Google?” – I couldn’t help but find myself asking a few basic questions of this office El Dorado.

For starters, if I made $6.5 billion profit and had a share price worth over $500 I would probably roll out a few air hockey tables for my staff too. It’s also worth noting that when Google began to feel the pinch of the financial crisis it was quick to cut back on staff luxuries, including closing some eateries.

But the broader question is why do you need a workplace that has laundry facilities, places to sleep and doctors? Aren’t these things that you are supposed to do outside of the office? I’m not entirely sure I want to work somewhere where your domestic life, chores though they are, are sucked into the sphere of the office.

Lunch at Google is great. The food court is as big as shopping mall, but the food is better and you don’t have to pay.

The group of journalists is separated from the rest of the Google staff and our company for lunch is a platoon of Google PR reps. The women arrive on a wave of straightened hair and Burberry, while the men have hip trench coats and a style that says, “I have the money to make my pants fit properly, and, unlike you, I went to a university that taught me not to get my lunch on them”.

Needing time to reconsider what I’m doing with my life, I excuse myself and find the closest bathroom. On the back of the stall door is a notice that alerts staff to the upgrading of some system or other. The entire bottom half of the poster is filled up with some enormous algorithm (if that’s even what it was, I don’t know), necessary to know for the upgrade.

At Google it seems you can’t go to the toilet without having work in your face, but then again, they do have those Japanese toilets that heat and massage your bum.

After lunch, like all good tourists, we were taken to the gift shop and I bought a pair of Google socks. I’m not entirely sure why I did that, but I don’t know anyone else with Google socks.

***

For all the crap that this website heaps upon Communications Minister Stephen Conroy, it was interesting to see the incredulous reaction on the internet to Conroy last week pointing out the privacy flaws in Buzz, and quoting Google CEO Eric Schmidt in the Wall Street Journal, who recently said “we love cash”.

In the war between China and Google, Google and the ISP filter, etc, a dichotomy has developed; on one side it positions Google as the champion of all things free and pure on one side and the rest are a pack of censoring fascists. Conroy’s apparent crime in this instance is to point out that Google, like all companies, has its own race to run which involves making money - a hell of a lot it.

Visiting Google felt similar to being approached by kids from the Hillsong church, who ask you to come along to just “an event” with other young people . . .  until you turn up with them and realise that, not only is it church, but a bloody well organised and extremely rich church.

Don’t get me wrong, if it’s a war between Google and China I’ll be wearing the Google socks, but it’s worth remembering that “do no evil” is not a particularly high hurdle to set yourself.

Leo Shanahan was the recipient of a grant from the Washington based Foreign Press Center to report on social media and government in the United States and was a guest of the US State Department.