In The Plex

I finished reading In The Plex, a great book on Google. There were some interesting passages on how some Google employees went to Washington, their experiences, the animosity they drew in while they were there. Their experiences is a perfect example of the conflict between two waves. Two waves are different from eachother as oil and water, they cannot mix, and eventually one will rise to top and replace other (the older one always loses). Some important paragraphs:

They joined a team of techie Obamanauts who saw their job as bringing the digital tools of empowerment to Washington. [..]

But when the outsiders like Stanton hit the nation’s capital, they went straight into a buzz saw of illogic, bad intentions, mistrust, and, worst of all, obsolete gadgets. Not only were they chained to outdated Windows computers, but they were denied the Internet tools they had come to rely on as much as breathing. Rules dictated that there could be no Facebook, no Google Talk, no Gmail, no Twitter, no Skype. (Even the president had to fight to retain his BlackBerry, and the one he wound up with was slowed down by security add-ons and cordoned off to all but a few designated texters.) “I’d been going a million miles an hour at Google,” she says. “And suddenly there were all these rules. Where you can put content. The Presidential Records Act. Terms of service agreements.” [..]. Not long after she took the job, Stanton did a reply-all email, which was common at Google. At the White House, someone took her aside and reprimanded her. [..]

The job was frustrating. Google hadn’t been perfect, but people got things done [..]. One of the big ideas of Google was that if you gave engineers the freedom to dream big and the power to do it—if you built the whole operation around their mind-set and made it clear that they were in charge—the impossible could be accomplished. But in the government, even though Stanton’s job was to build new technologies and programs, “I didn’t meet one engineer,” she says. “Not one software engineer who works for the United States government. I’m sure they exist, but I haven’t met any. At Google I worked with people far smarter and creative than me, and they were engineers, and they always made everyone else look good. They’re doers. We get stuck in the government because we really don’t have a lot of those people.” [..]

At a conference in January 2010, Stanton expressed her feelings about the difference between the White House and Google. “Working in government,” she said, “is like running a marathon. Blindfolded. Wearing sandbags.” Whereas Google was collegial, working for the White House was like a season of the reality show Survivor, whose motto was “Outwit, outplay, outlast.” [..]

[M]any of the Obamanauts’ dreams seemed to dissipate. Julius Genachowski’s efforts to extend broadband coverage met resistance at every turn. He did manage to get some billions of stimulus-related dollars devoted to building out broadband. But his efforts to enforce “net neutrality”—ensuring equal treatment of Internet services by providers such as AT&T, Verizon, and Comcast—were blocked by the corporations and even the courts. [..]

Both the government and Google found themselves targets of the powerful communications companies, who had used their power to profit from a system where Americans paid more for and got worse Internet service than much of the rest of the developed world.

The corporations spent millions of dollars lobbying Congress to make sure that regulations would not impede their efforts. They funded think tanks to create studies that attempted to prove that the current U.S. broadband coverage really wasn’t so bad. (What’s wrong with being twelfth out of the top twelve economies in the developed world?) One organization the corporations helped finance, called Consumer Watchdog, created a blog called “Inside Google” that demonized every move from Mountain View, from Google’s China policy to its ad quality algorithm. Opponents of Google characterized net neutrality as akin to communism.

Katie Stanton felt she’d had enough. “I feel like I’m a vegetarian trapped inside the sausage factory and it’s kind of ugly on the inside,” she said in the spring of 2010. In July, she left the State Department and took a job at Twitter. [.. T]here was one thing she could not understand. For all the love that Google got from its users and all the support that the Obama administration had gotten from Google, actually being from Google was almost like a handicap. “I was shocked at how much it almost hurt me,” she said. “Sometimes people treated it like a criminal record.”