Googleplex and Informational Culture

Chapter 5 Googleplex and Informational Culture Peter Jakobsson, Fredrik Stiernstedt Introduction Google is the world’s most used search engine and the second most visited web page on the Internet (Halavais 2009, p. 6). The company is arguably a center of power in the contemporary global media culture (van Couvering 2008; Vaidhyanathan 2007) and the search engine is part of our “technological unconscious” (Thrift 2004) by providing an infrastructure of knowledge that is becoming increasingly integrated into the everyday life of a great part of the world’s population. This chapter sets out to explore the headquarters of Google, Googleplex, which is situated in Silicon Valley and aims to answer the question of what kind of centrality is represented and performed in the building and what it can tell us about the presumably decentralized world of digital information? Googleplex was adapted for the company in 2004 by the San Francisco-based architect Clive Wilkinson. The house had previously been the home of Silicon Graphics, but was rebuilt for Google. This chapter will place Googleplex in an historical and architectural context, throwing light on the tradition from which it springs: a mode of building and city planning that incorporated information theory and cybernetics in the American postwar era. Furthermore, we will approach Googleplex through its surroundings, the functional and monumental aspects of the building, and as immaterial and mediated architecture. Googleplex will be explored as a metaphor for the role of the search engine in informational culture, as a mechanism of representation, expressing the ways Google itself seeks to be perceived, and as a materialization of how dominance and power are performed and executed in the digital era. The theoretical starting point of this chapter is the supposition that centrality in the digital era is achieved through the ability to connect, to be an effective transportation hub, transporting information and suppressing noise. Central to this achievement is the ability to transform things into information. In each part of the chapter, the analyses show how Googleplex, through all aspects of its architecture—the “main street,” the transparency, the hidden server halls—manages its operation not only by transporting information, but also by turning people and objects into information or putting them in a position where they can be handled and organized as information. The way this is accomplished is indeed decentralized, but only with the effect of increasing Google’s gravitational pull. Googleplex illustrates how power in an informational culture is constituted by the ability to dissolve matter into information—to animate that culture by providing the raw material it feeds on and provide the material substrate that allows it to live on and reproduce. FIGURE 1 HERE Googleplex as seen from the air. Photo courtesy of Google Inc. Informational Culture Looking at the ambitions of Google, one finds that those are to: “organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful” (Google.com 2008a). Setting the self-aggrandizement aside, this points to the company’s place in a cultural order that is centered on the concept of information. Borrowing Tiziana Terranova’s concept of “informational culture” (Terranova 2005), we see this as an order in which cultural processes are ”increasingly taking on the attributes of information—they are increasingly grasped and conceived in terms of their informational dynamics” (ibid. p. 7). The concept of an informational culture is, however, double-sided in that it has become both an active force in contemporary culture and an ideological construction that obscures the dynamics of power in society. A society built on technologies that are the direct result of theoretical innovations like those of Shannon & Weaver and Norbert Wiener, and at the same time a society that has incorporated the justifications and the rationality of these scientific theories into the political and economic systems. The feedback processes between the different spheres—culture, economy, and politics—have expanded the number of domains guided by—and arguably best theorized in—informational terms. Against this background, we will outline four principles guiding this informational culture and point to how they can be used to understand Google as a global center of the information age: signal-to-noise ratio, decentralization, self-regulation, and informatization. Shannon & Weaver's mathematical theory of communication (1949) proposes that communication can be understood as the relation between signal and noise. Their theory allows for an understanding of communication that disregards the content of messages and describes communication in pure mathematical terms. Whereas the original theory was developed to allow for analogue signals to travel vast distances, the kind of noise that threatens us on the Web today is instead the amount of information. The problem of signal-to-noise ratio in the age of digital communication is not related to distances but to selection, a problem that can be solved not by measuring but by counting. The patent that set Google off (Page & Brin 2001) was a solution to precisely this problem, how to find the relevant information in a sea of noise. The patent describes the so called PageRank algorithm, also described in Brin & Page (1998). Google solved the problem of relevance by applying two of the other principles of informational cultures: decentralization and self-organization. Wiener (1948) set out to describe how humans as well as societies could be understood as consisting of a number of smaller entities that through intercommunication and feedback processes contributed to the integrity of the organism. Decentralization and self-organization have since been central concepts within everything from artificial intelligence (AI) research to architecture (as will be explored further in this chapter). In order to understand the kind of decentralized and self-organizing systems under consideration here, however, we have to move beyond the work of Wiener and engage the concept of emergence (Johnson 2001) and “soft control” (Terranova 2005). Wiener was primarily interested in the role that feedback processes had in the survival of the organism. In capitalist markets in an informational culture, decentralization and self-regulation are also means of creating value. Emergence is when systems governed by relatively simple rules show signs of complex behaviour. What Google’s founders realized was that the Internet, when looked at from a bird’s eye view, showed certain patterns resulting from such behavior. All the links between different Web pages, when taken as a whole, constituted a pattern in which some pages attracted much more links than others. From the individual activities of Internet users emerged a pattern that, when treated mathematically, gave Google a way to calculate the relevance of a specific Web page. The Google algorithm is thus not only an algorithm for valorization of Web content but consequently also an instrument for control of and extracting value from the Internet. In total, this amounts to what Terranova (2005) theorizes as soft control and the way it is linked to value production in decentralized networks. This kind of control operates only at the start and end points in a given system, exploiting the creative freedom and movements within its given limits. On the Internet, this means the format of the content entered into the system (binary code, HTML code, etc.) and a mechanism for selecting relevant material (the Google algorithm). In an organization like a company, it means internalization of company values by the staff with instruments for surveying and selecting what kind of work is valuable to the company. Signal-to-noise ratio, decentralization, and self-organization, as described here, are thus important themes in the following analysis. These three are however reliant on yet another principle: informatization, the fourth and perhaps most important principle for our understanding of informational cultures. From Google’s point of view, the successful application of the above-mentioned principles is based on the premise that things – people and objects – are available as information. The organizing principles of informational governance are only effective if the world can be grasped and understood as information, rather than as continuous flows and statistical variations. It is from this principle that we may view the many ways Google gathers and transfers once noncomputable existences into information. From these principles—signal-to-noise ratio, decentralization, self-regulation and informatization—we can consider the centrality of Google as well as the company’s attempts to downplay this centrality. The company’s centrality can be assessed through its power to organize content rather than produce it; to suppress noise through decentralized modes of value production. Through storing, reading, analyzing, and organizing, the sum total of communicative production on the Internet, Google has managed to create pseudoindividual connections with a majority of all Internet users and supply them with ranked information on all things searchable. On the other hand, organization is also an act of production; selection and presentation are primary also in traditional media companies’ production of “content.” Through Google’s dependence on the content created by others and the apparent neutrality of their technological and mathematical modes of selection, the company claims to be guided by other beliefs and principles than mass media companies. But the informational milieu created by the company is not that different. Neither are the organizational powers of the company dependent on a single software algorithm, nor are they weightless, immaterial and imbued with a mathematical rationality. In the following parts of this chapter, we will see how this power is achieved and performed on several levels—metaphorical, representational, and material—within Google as an organization and especially through the company’s headquarters, Googleplex. We will however start by placing the company and its architecture in its proper historical and geographical place. Californian Architecture and Ideology Silicon Valley has in many ways been the birthplace of the U.S. computer industry (Lécuyer 2006; Saxenian 1994). Closely intertwined with Stanford University, the industrial park has grown rapidly over the years and has attracted a high density of immigrants from India and China who work in the software industry. With this in mind, it is no wonder that it was here that Google took off as the result of the work of two Stanford postgraduates, Sergey Brin and Larry Page: Brin, the descendant of two generations of professors in mathematics at Moscow University, and Page, the son of a pioneer within the nascent field of computer science in the 1960s (Vise 2005). It is here, in the Valley that the 47,000 square meters campus/office/laboratory/playground that is Googleplex, was built in 2004. As with other success stories before and since, its founders both went to Stanford, started off in a rented garage, got financial backing from the venture capitalists on Sand Hill Road, and were eventually introduced into the stock market, making its founders very wealthy. In contrast to other information and communication technology (ICT)-related businesses, however, Google has decided to stay in the Valley instead of moving to downtown San Francisco. This sent the message that Google is more about technology than content (Graham & Guy 2002). Google shares not only its myth of origin with other companies in the Valley, but also a corporate culture imbued with a mix of technological savvy and liberal ideals, typical of this region. It is the progressive, multicultural, post-hippie America described by Jean Baudrillard in his 1986 travelogue as a place with a slower “pace of work, decentralization, air conditioning, soft technologies. Paradise. But a very slight modification, a change of just a few degrees, would suffice to make it seem like hell” (Baudrillard 1986/1993, p. 46). For Baudrillard, Silicon Valley is a place that is “post-orgy,” wrapped in “a foetal tranquillity [sic],” a world without passions where all is organized, in a “total decentring, total community.” For Baudrillard, this decentralized community is a mental as well as a physical state that seeks to make all ruptures impossible. The “community” Baudrillard sees in the Valley is not organized to “converge [everything] on a single point” (ibid., p. 46), which is obvious in the city planning and architecture as well as in the ideology of “dogmatic pluralism” of Silicon Valley. For Baudrillard, this is the opposite of the organization of European cities, which often gravitate towards a single, defined, and visible centre (or even downtown San Francisco, which is shaped by the centralization of production characteristic of the nineteenth-century industrial capitalist city [Soja 1989, p. 193]). And for Baudrillard, “by that very token, it also becomes impossible to hold a demonstration: where could you assemble” in a place absent of squares or other distinct and open centers? (Baudrillard 1986/1993, p. 44). The architecture of the Valley then is one lacking spaces for conflict, decentralization in this way creates concurrence, making it impossible for ruptures or disagreements to be played out in the cityscape. In other words, the seemingly centrifugal forces of the Silicon Valley converge with its opposite: the centripetal force of the total community, effectively negating the need for an agora. A well-known description of the ideals of this community is found in Richard Barbrook and Andy Cameron’s 1995 account of The Californian Ideology: the bizarre fusion of the cultural bohemianism of San Francisco with the hi-tech industries of the Silicon Valley. […] the Californian Ideology promiscuously combines the free-wheeling spirit of the hippies and the entrepreneurial zeal of the yuppies. This amalgamation of opposites has been achieved through a profound faith in the emancipatory potential of the new information technologies. In the digital utopia, everybody will be both hip and rich (Barbrook & Cameron 1995, without paging). Google, with its motto “Don’t be evil,” is one of the companies embodying the technologically deterministic liberalism of this ideology. In interviews and written statements, the company’s founders, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, often speak of their ambition to “change the world” (Battelle 2005, p. 66). What they actually mean by this assertion is quite diffuse, but what it indicates is that for them Google is a project and a company with a utopian stance. The perpetual drive to “organize all information” could also be seen as placing Google, if not geographically, then at least ideologically in the middle of the Silicon Valley. As stated by Larry Page in a 2004 interview, “everything that Google does shall have positive social consequences” (Sheff 2004). This idea of pragmatic mathematics serving a liberal cause is widespread, not only in the history of Silicon Valley but in the American history of ideas in general. Google could hence be seen as perpetuating a line of work that goes through Norbert Wiener’s cybernetics and the notion of engineering and applied mathematics as not only a scientific but also a social endeavour (Wiener 1950). The architecture of Silicon Valley and Googleplex materializes this ideology in several ways. From an historical perspective, the style of office buildings and city planning in Silicon Valley constitute part of what Reinhold Martin (2005) calls the “organizational complex,” the “aesthetic and technological extension of what has been known since the early 1960s as the ‘military-industrial complex’” (ibid., pp. 3–4). The American modernism in the architecture of the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s was a mix of the previous avant-garde and experimental esthetics of the early twentieth century, and the military and techno-scientific developments of the war years, altering the very fabric of modernity. New materials like aluminum and plastics made possible several rationalizations in construction work—a connection between the war industry and peacetime housing, made explicit in a 1943 advertisement for the George E. Ream Company, announcing: “Plywood for war, later for peace” (in Buisson & Billard 2004). This era saw the “dispersal of urban infrastructures into an increasingly horizontal network of communication and transportation lines [. . .] a development of a systems-based notion of organization in architecture” (Martin 2005, pp. 7–8). This was a direct result of the developments in cybernetics and information theory during the war that hurled “towards a peacetime industry dedicated to the individual” (Buisson & Billard 2004, p. 24). The decentralization of postwar America, in which suburbs and business parks spread across the landscape, was in a similar fashion a logical consequence of the Cold War and the fear of atomic warfare in which “dissemination [in space] is seen as a deterrent from bombardment” (ibid.). A decentralization that was planned and calculated by cyberneticians like Norbert Wiener, who together with Karl Deutsch and Giorgio de Santillana, published an article in Life in December 1950 titled “How U.S Cities can prepare for Atomic War.” According to Rheinhold Martin, Wiener was the primary author of the plan and the text proposed that the city is to be understood as a giant “communicative organism.” In a draft version of the article, Wiener and the other authors wrote that “the danger of blocked communications in a city subject to emergency conditions is analogous to the danger of blocked communications in the human body” (quote from Martin 2005, p. 28). The solution to such a problem would, according to the three authors be to create dispersed and decentralized cities, “reaching outward to maintain equilibrium and to overcome the entropic effects of traffic jams and communications breakdowns in the wake of nuclear bombardment” (ibid). Accordingly, Googleplex is not to be found in the center of either Silicon Valley or Mountain View, the name of the suburb where it is located, since there is actually no center in which to be located. Driving through this sprawling landscape and its meandering suburban streets, you unwittingly arrive at the entrance of the main building before you even know it is there. However, Google’s domain is not limited to the four buildings that make up the core of Googleplex; instead, it is spread out over several blocks of low buildings: Google's sprawling, cheerfully dystopian campus at Mountain View may intimidate the first-time visitor. But there's no need to fear. The easy rule of thumb dictates that the most concentrated power centres gravitate toward the middle (where the engineers and their excellent cafeterias reside) (valleywag.com 2007, without paging). Yes, the seemingly unorganized architecture does indeed have centers. Although the free bus service and various cafés are important to Google, it is the four buildings that make up the actual Googleplex that grab the attention of most visitors. This is where the company has spent its resources and is intent on making a statement. Otherwise, Googleplex lives seemingly in symbiosis with its environment, fitting snugly among the other hi-tech companies in the vicinity, with only the logos distinguishing one office building from the other. FIGURE 2 HERE Figure 2: Googeplex’ main entrance. Photo courtesy of Tim Trueman. The American modernism in the architecture of the 1950s and 1960s, influenced to a high degree by information theory, cybernetics and techno-scientific engineering, is in many ways a distinctively Californian modernism (Buisson & Billard 2004). The prime example of this is the Case Study Houses of the 1950s and 1960s, which can be seen as the leisure equivalent to the office buildings in Silicon Valley. The Case Study Houses were a result of the California-based Arts & Architecture magazine, which, in the 1940s, commissioned major architects of the day, including Richard Neutra, Raphael Soriano, Craig Ellwood, Charles and Ray Eames, Pierre Koenig, and Eero Saarinen, to design and build inexpensive and efficient model homes for the U.S. residential housing boom. The boom was in part caused by the end of the Second World War and the return of millions of soldiers. For them, home ownership was made possible by the institution of the GI Bill of Rights, which allowed former soldiers to benefit from loans that covered the entire cost of a house without the need for an initial contribution (ibid., p. 31). The solution to the housing problem was hence a radically individualistic one, and owning one’s home was seen—by John Entenza, editor of Arts & Architecture—as a “tool of man’s fulfilment” (Buisson & Billard 2004, p. 24) and an important part of the American ideology in general: so important that the government favored the acquisition of single-family homes through exemption from certain taxes (ibid.). The Case Study Houses were a product of, as well as a performer in, not only the American individualist and consumerist ideology, but also the ideologies of techno-scientific engineering. The announcement of the Case Study House program, published in the Arts & Architecture magazine in January 1945, reads that “it is important [that we] arrive at a ‘good’ solution to each problem, which in the overall program will be general enough to be of practical assistance to the average American in search of a home in which he can afford to live” (Entenza 1945). The goal was to, repeating the famous motto of Le Corbusier, create “machine[s] for living” (Buisson & Billard 2004, p. 37). Rational and functional houses, possible to operate without the help of servants, saturated with the latest technologies, housing not only people but the new media of the day. Television sets were embedded in the architecture and television screens entrenched in the walls of several of the houses. The houses themselves were also thought to function as media for facilitating communication. In the very first Case Study House (by Julius Ralph Davidson), the architecture included perforated wall openings between several of the rooms so that the inhabitants could see and be seen, as well as easily talk to each other: the building was meant to make communication easier between family members and, in cybernetic terms, foster intercommunication and feedback processes contributing to the integrity and maintenance of the family organism. The esthetics of the Case Study Houses have continued creating one of several styles of architecture specific to California, one exuding functionality, transparency, low-story houses in simple materials, saturated with communication media and transgressing the binaries of outside/inside (Buisson & Billard 2004). The announcement of the Case Study House Program in Arts & Architecture magazine also echoes in California-based Googleplex architect Clive Wilkinson’s statement that the engineers of Google “needed to see clear-cut reasoning” (Chang 2006) behind design decisions, and it was when he realized this and began to present his plans as a series of solutions that Google became receptive: The workplace is ideally a mirror of the organization in the same way that the human body represents how its organs collaborate as a multifaceted machine [. . .] The first task is to clarify the workings of the machine, but the second, equally important point is that individuals should feel some sense of ownership and belonging—of possessing and being possessed by the company. (Quoted in Chen 2006, without paging) In this quote, Wilkinson furthers the notion of Googleplex as a “machine for working,” extending Le Corbusier’s motto with the language of cybernetics to support his ideas. But he also envisages the workplace as a machine for living, promoting a workplace “architecture of togetherness [in which] the sociability factor is integral” (ibid.). This brings to mind the Baudrillardian notion of “total community” in which electronic tribalism achieves a perfected illustration by the company itself possessing the worker, through the architecture. Other features of the Californian modernism embodied in the Case Study Houses and—as we will see below—furthered in Googleplex are, for example, the way that the Google headquarters are constructed to enhance communication: the incorporation of new media in the building; the thematics of inside vs. outside; the functionality and simplicity of the architecture; and the way in which Googleplex, just like the Case Study Houses, has become intensively mediated, to the extent that one can see the building as a “prop for the media” (Colomina 1996). The Functions of Googleplex Passing by the piano, lava lamps, and live projection of current search queries from around the world that meet the visitor walking through the main entrance of Googleplex, one soon finds oneself in a space where transparent, glass offices line virtually the entire building perimeter. But what kind of work is done here? How is it organized? And in what way does the building partake in the organization of work at Google? Within the software industry in general and at Google in particular, the dream of “working as a hobby” has been taken to its utmost extreme (e.g. Ross 2004). In an article published in the journal Metropolis Magazine in July 2006, journalist Jade Chang describes the working day of Google employee Corin Anderson: Each day he sits in the midst of figurines, Legos, and stuffed animals, eyes fixed on his computer screen and earphones strapped on, for hours at a stretch. When he wants a snack, he walks to the fully stocked micro-kitchen, maybe breaking open a bag of organic potato chips or grabbing a handful of trail mix. Twenty percent of the time—with his employer’s full approval—he works on projects of his own devising that are only tangentially related to his job. And strangest of all, come nightfall he often has no desire to go home, preferring to get dinner, gratis, in one of the employee cafés, followed by a few hours playing a strategic card game with some colleagues in a small meeting room. (Chang 2006, withput paging). The image seems to be working. Every 25 seconds Google receives a job application, from yet another hopeful young engineer eager to live the dream of becoming a Google programmer. Clive Wilkinson has explained that the main idea of Googleplex is to make it feel like “an average American city.” And most certainly, many of the activities and services of a city are to be found in Googleplex (leisure activities as well as hairdressers, medical doctors, daycare centers, etc). Google has also published several pictures from Googleplex on its Web site, showing employees taking part in the simple pleasures of consumption, as well as seemingly combining work and leisure. This image serves the purpose of expressing the “nicety” and everydayness of Google’s operations and implicitly the nicety of Google as a technology. Work at Googleplex is organized in a flat and decentralized manner, with a couple of devices for managing the relationship between everyday work and the overall goals of the company. One of those devices is Googletts, small groups of Googlers working independently on their own projects. With a system resembling the freedom found in academia to pursue one’s own goals, each employee has 20 percent of the working week to dedicate entirely to projects of his or her own choosing. With the trust that good and interesting work will attract attention, it is up to the employees to seek out the teams and projects they find interesting. This way, groups will increase and decrease in mass in a self-regulative manner without too much intervention. Google's mail service is one of the products developed within this system. This manner of organization of work is not far from how the company organizes information on the Internet and elsewhere, trusting mechanisms of self-regulation and decentralization to counteract noise in the system. As described above, the basic advantage that Google's algorithms provide in comparison to its competitors is the way they rank results. Noticing that some sites were “linked to” more often than others provided a key to weighing the importance of sites against each other. Sites with many incoming links were bound to be more important than others. Rather than being totally disorganized, there was a structure to the Internet and it was a structure that the users provided themselves. By observing the mechanisms of this self-regulation and making them explicit through their search technology, the company managed to build its successful technology. Work in Googleplex seems to be organized in the same way. By having several small teams working independently on projects they choose themselves and letting these teams attract other workers if they find these interesting, Google has devised a system for their workplace similar to that of their search engine. Another device implemented to manage the relationship between the micro and the macro is the Top 100 list, presenting the best projects currently being worked on. This way of organizing things at an Internet company with a strong belief in the democratic power of technology is not surprising either. In a way, this is how the Internet architecture as a whole balances the different demands placed on it by competing forces of decentralization and hierarchization (cf. Galloway 2004). While the TCP/IP protocol places the entire Internet structure on a flat surface with equal connectivity between each and every node, the DNS structure (.org, .com, etc.) provides the Internet with its well-known hierarchies. Overall, Google relies on the kind of soft control Terranova (2005) described earlier: self-motivation in combination with self-regulation is seen to be the key to success. It would, however, be difficult to imagine that this kind of organization could hold together without any overarching structure. One such structure, which, in the words of Bruno Latour can be called “the missing masses” (Latour 1992) of decentralized management, and which supplies the needed gravitational pull of Google is the architecture of its headquarters.cultural Architect Clive Wilkinson explains the idea of using the “average American city” as a template for the architecture of Googleplex: “People like variety. They need places to congregate. Casual interaction fosters teamwork and creativity” (quoted in Chen 2006). The solution the architect offered Google is evidently based on the belief that communication and interaction result in innovations as well as a feeling of community, echoing Wiener's words that the community stretches only as far is its effectual communications (Wiener 1948). At the core of Googleplex is a miniature city of tinted glass rooms, padded pavilions and Astroturf lawns, all anchored by a monumental stairway embedded with laptop ports. Keywords for the construction are openness and transparency, echoed in the use of glass and large open spaces in the building. The building also features a central spine, or in the words of the architect, a "main street," around which "neighborhoods" of activity are clustered (quoted in Chen 2006). The construction is meant to create a communicative autostrada ending in the stairway where the employees can gather and be able to keep their laptops running. The stairway underlines the rhizomatic ideal of Googleplex. It is a place for meetings and gatherings that at the same time seeks to keep and exploit the flexibility and connectivity of movement and fluidity: a place perpetually open to the formation of new connections or the re-formation of old ones, as people transport themselves through the building, pass by the stairway, join or leave, connecting or disconnecting in a self-organizing network of labour. FIGURE 3 AND 4 HERE Figure 3 and 4: Drawings of Googleplex. Courtesy of Clive Wilkinson. And in many ways the whole building organizes work through its communicative abilities. The “main street,” a central nerve in the social life of many American towns and cities, is here understood as a channel for effectively and indiscriminately relaying information and people through the building, just like the glass and open spaces create an instantaneous awareness of what kind of work is going on in each part of the building. The keyword for how communication is understood here is transportation. As opposed to the business model of the Internet portals, which relied on the hope of keeping users within the main site while collecting valuable eyeballs, Google only directs users (and is paid per click) in the manner of a logistical company. Analogously, Googleplex offers no obstacles or boundaries for the free movement of information, and in the end supplies a structure for the dissemination and transportation of information. Soft and hard architecture The first thing that meets visitor and employee alike upon setting foot in one of the lobbies at Googleplex is a mediatization of the company’s operations. As a reminder of what Google is about, monitors display search queries being entered into the company’s search engine at all times, around the world. A constant stream of search strings pop up and fade away at a rate of dozens a second—of course, not nearly as many as are actually being processed by the system, and queries are also censored to avoid the possibly embarrassing truth of the actual use of the technology. Thus, while not an accurate representation of what is actually happening in the company’s server halls, the flashing screens still speak plenty of Google’s line of business and its function. A perhaps more spectacular show, which can also be found on the premises, is provided by the visualization of Google searches, in the form of radiating light, on the projection of a spinning globe. As the globe spins, the spectator can witness light shooting off the surface of the earth, with different colors representing different quantities of data. In another viewing mode, the globe can show the way the data travels back and forth between users and Google’s centers of computation. Apart from residing within the building itself, this globe is also something the founders use as a way of presenting their company in public settings (ted.com 2007). FIGURE 5 AND 6 HERE Figure 5: Projection of search queries in Googleplex lobby. Photo courtesy of Yoz Grahame. Figure 6: Visualization of data handled by the search engine. Photo courtesy of Yoz Grahame. What can we make of these representations of the company? For one thing, this is obviously a way for the company to represent its own operations to itself, its employees, and others. It provides an answer to the question “What do we do?”, an obvious dilemma for companies that do not produce anything in the traditional meaning of the word. More than this, however, it makes visible the reversed logic of Google’s operation as a media company. Whereas a traditional media building sends things out of the building, Google is instead the receiver of enormous amounts of information. That is not to say that not all media companies, as well as media houses function as receivers. But for Google, not only is the very idea of being a media company alien to the company’s self-perception, the business model as such is to receive, process, and create connections in an ever-increasing info-mass, constantly on the verge of entropic incalculableness. As light shoots out anywhere on the globe, information is rapidly being transported from sender to receiver and ends up somewhere in the company’s databases, to be consumed and analyzed and finally converted into valuable knowledge for Google’s engineers and companies looking for advertising space. Each search string and ray of light is simultaneously a user being served by the company as well as raw material for the search engine’s and advertising system’s algorithms, waiting to be converted into productive knowledge for the company. As Google represents its own operations through new media incorporated into the architecture, one aspect is missing. Search strings appear and fade away, light flashes and dies out, but the enormous amounts of information kept in the company’s ever-expanding storage facilities and the facilities themselves are nowhere to be found. Search strings are not the only information the company gathers. In order to make the Web searchable, collecting and indexing each Web page is crucial. The quantity of Web pages is consequently one way search companies compete with each other. Apart from Web pages and search queries, the company also keeps and indexes large amounts of email traffic from its Gmail service. The private communication of millions of users is also to be found in the company’s databases. Nowhere, however, are these aspects of Google’s operations to be found in the public parts of Googleplex. Indeed, the locations of the company’s data storage facilities are shrouded in mystery. No one, outside the company, really knows where they are located, and no one knows how many of these data centers are there. This is partly because the establishment of new computing centers is subject to nondisclosure agreements with local authorities at the places chosen by the company (Markoff & Hansel 2006). According to Miller (2009), there are at least 12 major server halls within the United States and five more in Europe. There have been rumors of new data centers to open in Asia, for example in Taiwan, as well as speculations of new data centers in Lithuania (ibid.). Although an amount of secrecy is not in any way unusual in this line of business, there is something about Google’s self-presentation regarding this matter that overplays the decentralizing tendencies while downplaying the centralizing aspects of its business strategies. From the beginning, Google has relied on off-the-shelf consumer electronics when constructing their computational and storage facilities. By connecting large numbers of relatively cheap computers, they have bested the computational capacities of most supercomputers. This is a sometimes forgotten, but crucial, part of Google’s strategy (Vise 2005). This unique system architecture has occasionally been called “Googleware” (ibid.) or “distributed computing” (Battelle 2005, p. 129). A great advantage Google has over its competitors lies in the huge investments in hardware it has made over the years, about which it is still rather secretive, but it has been approximated that Google maintains as many as one million servers. It has also been estimated that Google spent about $2.4 billion on four new data centers in 2007 and that as much as one-third of all servers shipped by the entire computer industry go into the data centers of Google, Amazon, Yahoo, eBay, and Microsoft, and a few others. As search terms swoosh by on the monitors in Googleplex, this material basis for its operations is hidden from view. If software seems malleable, portable and often provisional (e.g. Manovich 2001), hardware implies the opposite. The representation of Google’s operations within Googleplex suggests that Google is a software company based on the power of its search algorithms, making the company appear less traditional, less intimidating, and less enduring. But the material base for these representations is to be found in the traditional industrial geography in which the data centers are inscribed. Since, for example, the single most important factor for the placement of a data center is the availability of large volumes of cheap electricity and vast amounts of water for cooling, It has been estimated that every single server farm demands about 103 megawatts of electricity (enough to power 82,000 homes). they often come to inherit facilities used as paper mills or aluminum smelters (Strand 2008). The immaterial architecture of Googleplex (for example, the screens with search strings) displays an ideological version of software as a decentralizing force: “among postmodern strategies of appearance, none is as effective as the simulation that there really is software” (Kittler 1997, p. 156). As long as we are led to believe that Google bases its operations on the benevolent PageRank algorithms and forget the massive computational powers and storage facilities of the company, Google can continue to portray itself as a “personal” and empowering medium fit for a globalized order: totally decentered, effectuating total community. Monumental Architecture of Googleplex One general feature of media headquarters seems to be their monumentality. This at least appears to be the case for national and state-regulated media such as those discussed in the other chapters of this book, as well as other large media organizations like the Chicago Tribune or the New York Times and its tower in Times Square. The very centrality of their positioning in the cityscapes, as well as their size, contributes to inscribing them in the esthetic regime of the monument. The homes of “old” media, at least in their exteriors, resonate with times past (in the way that the BBC Broadcasting House resembles a medieval fortress) or history in the making (like the space race replica rocket that makes up the 1960’s Ostankino television tower in Moscow). In a similar fashion, the interiors at Googleplex are filled with elements that could be labeled as monumental: large-scale installations, metaphors and materializations of Google’s place in space and time. The monumentality of Google, however, is different from the one we are familiar with from the media buildings of national television and radio, as well as the monumentality of churches, memorials, and official buildings from the modern era. First of all, the exteriors of Googleplex are anonymous, flat, and sprawling. The building is almost un-monumental, seen from the outside. The buildings are not organized according to a vertical and hierarchical scheme; instead, the facilities spread horizontally and the area is crossed by roads and open spaces. There is no master plan, the entirety of strength or collected, intended effect, which monumentality seems to require is missing. Instead, the monumental features of Googleplex are to be found in the interiors of the building. Here we will briefly discuss two of the largest, and perhaps the most spectacular, features of the interior design of Googleplex, explicitly connected to questions of time and space. The first is the full-scale replica skeleton of a T-Rex displayed in an aggressive mode, frozen in a roar toward passers-by (Figure 6). The skeleton was left when the previous tenant, Silicon Graphics, moved out of the building. Silicon Graphics was the company behind the special effects of the movie Jurassic Park, famous for its extensive and, at the time, original use of computer animation (Takahashistaff 2007). FIGURE 7 HERE Figure 6: T-rex. Photo courtesy of Bryan Green. The second monumental feature we will discuss here is a replica of SpaceShipOne (Figure 7)—the first space plane to complete a privately funded human space flight—hanging from the ceiling in the lobby at the main entrance. To get it there, the wall of the main building had to be torn down and then rebuilt after the installation of the space plane inside. These installations could be understood as “geek-chic” manifestations of the nerdy fascination with the “coolness” of spaceships and predators. Certainly, the monumental features of Googleplex could be understood as monuments over Silicon Valley itself and the developments in space technology and special effects that have been created there. But as interior design these features also work to “reinvent and communicate the values of the company”, in the words of architect Clive Wilkinson. FIGURE 8 HERE Figure 8: A replica of SpaceShipOne. Photo courtesy of Nan Palmero. The dinosaur and the space plane as artifacts, as objects of interior design, are readymades. As opposed to what one would spontaneously think of a monument, they are not constructed as site-specific buildings or parts of buildings. Instead, they are objects lifted out of specific contexts (places, times) and put together in Googleplex. This fact underlines the tendency of Googleplex in general to express the difference between Google and other media companies. Googleplex is not a building whose location is adapted to a situation of transmission, but an object of architecture that underlines Google as being on the receiving end in the communicative relationship or as being a mediator, a connective hub, facilitating the connection instead of the content. At least this is how Google wants to be perceived, as a media company that does not transmit or produce content—hence the anonymous character of the exterior—and accordingly the building lets objects with symbolic historical force enter the premises and be assembled in order to make the building speak, in the first place, to those inhabiting it. But soon, pictures and texts, representations of these features, are disseminated—not by Google itself but by visitors photographing, filming, writing, and publishing online, creating a decentralized and distributed, omnipresent and immaterial monumentality of sorts. The objects obviously handle questions of time and history. They contribute to telling the story of Google as something radically new, a new phase or era of human existence (or of the world). Through the integration of these rather arbitrary, but highly symbolic, “quotations” of historical events—the rise and fall of giant predators during the late Triassic and Cretaceous periods and the human conquering of outer space in the twentieth century—into the building, Google is represented as transcending these phases. To put the previous periods in the building is to seal them off as “historical,” in the same way as a museum functions to create history through periodization of its displays. But even more than that, since Googleplex is not a museum, these monuments serve to tell a very particular history. Just like the dinosaurs became extinct, the Space Age is now transcended by the digital era, whereby the new frontier is not the conquering of foreign worlds, solar systems, or planets but the organization of all knowledge and information. The Space Age sought to cross the frontiers to realities beyond human experience and expand the world as we know it, in making outer space visible (and audible) through modern technologies of representation and transmission (such as the camera, microphone and satellite). Google, on the other hand—as represented in Googleplex—inherits a world that is fully visible (a world “after the orgy” [Baudrillard 1986/1993, p. 46]). What remains is to map and systematize this already conquered space, as well as the digital space, and not least the interiors of human minds and bodies. This is clear in the Google DNA project, in which Google is making the entire human DNA code searchable and visible (understandable) for everyone. There is of course also a connection here between the dinosaur and the DNA project since it can be argued that it was the film Jurassic Park that for the first time brought the implications of biotechnology into popular culture. This is also manifested through the moon project in which Google is charting and making visible to all—not only for astronauts and their cameras—the surface of the moon (Google 2008b). This is equally visible in the ways Google G-mail indexes and makes searchable (and commodifies) every single word written in one-to-one, interpersonal communication and customizes the advertisements in Gmail according to what a user’s correspondence is about. And most evidently, this can be seen in the ways our queries are indexed and made into knowledge; the inner longings and passions, the everyday curiosities and the cognitive abilities of billions of people all become visible and are turned into information through the Google algorithms and hardware. This is best exemplified in the Google Zeitgeist project (www.google.com/intl/en/press/zeitgeist/index.html), which tracks trends in search queries over time. The technology translates our vernacular into computer code, and back again—making it possible to systematize and hence anticipate not only the answers we are looking for but also the questions we ask: “‘The ultimate search engine,’ says Larry Page, ‘would understand exactly what you mean and give you back exactly what you want” (Vise 2005, p. 282). This understanding of search implies that relevant search results require not only massive indexes but also an understanding of whoever is looking for information. Google aims to construct a search engine that not only is good at taking commands but that with the help of the sheer mass of information lets Google understand its users from within and make their desires visible and transparent. Informational culture ultimately turns not only everything but everyone into information, thereby overcoming the noise constituted by the modern “superstitions” of subjectivity, humanity, and the individual. The monuments of Googleplex thus tell us what Google wants to be or how it would like to be perceived. But these features of the building, around which the majority of the on-line commentaries and photographs of Googleplex circulates, also contribute to a masking of what Google is truly about. The most common interpretation of the dinosaur is that it represents the era of the hardware giants. Or perhaps also the large, bureaucratic, and nonuser-friendly software developers such as Microsoft. This is also the ideological triumph of Googleplex, as hinted at earlier. Software appears to be more democratic than hardware. Not everyone can write software, of course, but still: since the whole idea of a participatory culture rests on the ability of everyone to write, instead of just read (and according to this ideology there is only a gradual difference between assembler code, high-level programming languages and human languages), the idea of a decentralized media landscape rests on the promise of software. The so-called gift economy of the Internet always stops at software, since information is nonrivalrous and affords copying. Google sees itself as a forerunner in this software economy and, as such, as surpassing the slowly evolving dinosaurs of hardware. But as previously mentioned, the extreme dominance of Google is based not on its algorithms but on its computing power, its hardware. It is also the computing power of the company that allows it to reach inwards as well as outwards to access and organize evermore kinds of information. 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