The meaning of Google+
When I first encountered Google+, I was delighted. And then, shortly after that, I was bored. Like so many American cultural events – like the premiere of The Hills or the release of George W. Bush’s memoir – Google+ manages to evoke these two feelings, delight and boredom, simultaneously, to give one the feeling of beholding something beautiful and yet utterly the same, like a knock-off of a sequel of something remarkable.
Google+ is different. One realizes this immediately. Far more beautiful than most Google products, it evokes the elegance of the first iPod or an American Apparel t-shirt. And yet, it’s also far less brilliant than most Google products. It is just one more set of social tools, one more walled-off garden, where everything is emphemera and fragmentation, of the type the web 2.0 has already given us so much of.
All this matters because Google+ isn’t just another piece of Google software. And Google isn’t just another company. As the name implies, Google+ is something of a second coming of one of the most important companies in the world. The “second coming” of Google, one realizes – again, with surprise and then with boredom – has taken the form of a Facebook rip-off with a shiny finish.
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Theorists of capitalism make a distinction between “sustaining” innovations and “disruptive” ones. Sustaining innovations improve upon existing institutions, while disruptive innovations undermine those institutions, by giving us something new. Google has always traded in disruption: Page Rank, Google Docs, their Maps API, Google Books, Google Voice, ChomeBook, self-driving cars… But Google+ is different. It’s sustaining in the extreme. We get an incremental improvement upon a social networking model that was (to say the least) dubious to begin with, a model where people share and connect with their friends within “walled-off gardens,” according to tightly restricted rules, for the benefit of a single corporation’s bottom line. This is Facebook’s model. And now it’s Google’s.
There are many problems in this fallen world of ours, but I humbly suggest that my ability to share party photos and silly links with my friends is not one of them. Meanwhile, corporate ownerships of the means we have to communicate our ideas – corporate ownership of the “marketplace” of ideas we trade on – is one of the world’s problems. That Google would build the next major social networking platform by copying the most frivolous, and probably odious, features of the one we already have, makes it a turning point for Google, and, I fear, a warning sign for the rest of us. The age of the open web is coming to an end. The iconic company of that age, Google Inc., has sold out.
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Google’s flagship product, Google Search, made the Web accessible. Search tamed the chaos of the Web. And yet Google Inc., perhaps paradoxically, has also done more than any other company to demonstrate that the Web’s inherent orderlessness – its radical decentralization, its low-barriers-to-entry experimentalism, and its openness – could be an effective business model.
When techies talk about the “freedom” of the Web, they mean, basically, the freedom to build anything on the Web, without asking anyone’s permission. This freedom creates chaos, of course (as is freedom’s wont), but it also unleashes genius. If Google was to keep up with the chaos and genius of the Web, it believed that it would have to mirror it. As a practical matter, this meant that Google would engage in small, decentralized experiments; that employees would act as entrepreneurs (spending 20% of their time hacking together their own projects); apps would be released early, and iterated often; and almost everything would be given away for free. Because nearly all of its revenue would come from Search, and because Google Search is the main way the world enters the Web, Google’s growth would be tied inextricably with the growth and value of the Web. What’s good for the Web is thus, per force, good for Google. “Don’t be evil,” Google’s unofficial slogan, is a rational calculation.
Thus Google would be unlike any company ever built. It would be a platform for innovation, not a single service. It’s not an exaggeration to say, then, that the very essence of the company is constituted to give us products quite unlike Google+ – which is to say, products that are unrefined, often terrible, but sometimes revolutionary. Like the Web itself.
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But what happens when the Web begins to die? Or more precisely, when the locus of activity on the Internet (which is simply a neutral protocol for exchanging bits of data) shifts from those HTML-based “Web pages” that Google searches so well, to the closed and inaccessible world of apps, like Facebook, Pandora, Netflix, Twitter, Skype, Times Skimmer, and Angry Birds? To explain Google+, you must begin with this single fact: the major information infrastructure of our time, the Internet, is in the midst of a major restructuring. The sprawling labyrinth of the World Wide Web is being replaced by a rigidly ordered and centrally controlled world of apps.
Facebook is the face of this shift. Deeply integrated with the Web, Facebook is nevertheless something of its antonym. When you create with Facebook, you are following Facebook’s rules, which were approved by a single CEO, who was acting on behalf of a single corporate entity. One does not have to be a 1960s-style pessimist to fear for the future of free speech in world where bi-directional communication platforms are owned in such a way. Think: what if every printing press was designed according to the specifications of one corporation, and that corporation watched everything that was printed? We return to the earlier question: What happens to a company such as Google when the substrate that it feeds upon, and has co-evolved around – the Web – accounts for than less 25% of the traffic on the Internet, and, as a classic Wired article from last summer pointed out, that number “is shrinking”?
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Google+ began with fear, not brilliance. To Vic Gundotra, Google+’s project lead, social software has been “the most epic failure of Google.” “Because we were focusing on organizing the world’s information,” Gundotra says, “the search company failed to do the most important search of all,” the search, that is, “for people.” According to this redemption narrative, Google+ saves Google from the sins of its own unsocial software, with Gundotra, naturally, as Christ. The story is compelling (especially for Gundrota). But is it true? If Google has really “epically failed” at building social software, then what should we make of Gmail, Google Groups, GChat, Google Docs, Blogger, YouTube, and Android, all of which, as a point of fact, mediate the majority of my digital communication with the people whom I care about? If these aren’t “social,” then what is? Or are we supposed to believe that Facebook’s form, an infinitesimally small blip in the long history of human communication, is the final form of “social”?
People like to say that “necessity is the mother of invention,” but as often as not, the opposite is the case. Necessity compels people to steal. For when you believe, as Google+’s project head Vic Gundotra apparently does, that you’re at a “bet-the-company” moment, you don’t invent radical new models, you steal the ones that work. And that’s what Google did. Conspicuously gone from Google+’s development process was Google’s famed decentralized and experimental ethos. While Facebook grew line-by-line, feature-by-feature – its development unfolding in real-time, like a national drama – Google+ was built by orders from the top, and then launched across a user base that was already hundreds of millions of people large. Gone from Google+’s final form, likewise, is the openness and expressiveness that defines the Web. The redemption story that Gundotra tells thus has a Greek twist: Google saves itself by turning against the principles that made its own life possible.
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If it’s true that our world needs an alternative to Facebook – if sharing ideas across networks is important, and yet the models we have are incomplete – then the stakes are high, for Google may be one of the only companies that could give us said alternative. It’s not immediately obvious why this is. In a perfectly competitive market, superior products should beat inferior ones. On the margins, one assumes, people will buy the better toaster. So if you want to compete with Facebook, why not just build a better Facebook?
It’s not that simple. Social networks can’t simply be out-competed by high quality products, because the quality of the product is itself a function of how many people are using. This is what economist call “positive network externalities”: the more people who join a network, the more valuable that network becomes for everyone; and in turn, the more valuable the network becomes, the more people have reason to join it – and so it grows, in a virtuous cycle. This gives Facebook, which came first, a huge advantage. The hyped start-up Diaspora, by contrast, gives us an almost-pathetic illustration of how hard it is to compete with Facebook by taking its basic form and working your way up from the bottom. Thus Google’s access to millions of user emails, and to millions of dollars in funding, makes it uniquely able to break the back of the positive network externality trap. Which makes Google+ that much sadder.
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Facebook’s legacy will likely be cultural, rather than technological. The Facebook story makes me happy to be alive: we live in a world where students no older than the writers of this magazine can create world-defining institutions, and do it without asking anyone’s permission. That is the freedom of the Web – and that is the freedom, paradoxically, that Facebook is slowly quelling, and the force, in the end, that may ultimately lead to its defeat. The company that beats Facebook will do so by emulating its story, not its form. It will beat the monopolistic company by giving us something totally new – something more open, more decentralized, more expressive. We cannot know for sure what that product will be, but one thing seems certain: it’s not Google+.
