How I Lost Faith in Google

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.