Google Won't Play Our Ad For Julie Oliver Because: "Shocking Content"

 

Blue America's IE Committee has begun purchasing ads in support of our candidates. The first batch went up as YouTube pre-roll for Kara Eastman (NE-02), Liam O'Mara (CA-42), Mike Siegel (TX-10) and Julie Oliver (TX-25). There's another one, still in production, going up for Adam Christensen (FL-03) this week. I want to talk about the Julie Oliver ad because Google removed it and told us it violates their "shocking content" policy. They didn't tell us which part of the ad violates the policy. Here's the policy:

Shocking content

The following is not allowed:

• Promotions containing violent language, gruesome or disgusting imagery, or graphic images or accounts of physical trauma

Examples (non-exhaustive): Crime scene or accident photos, execution videos

• Promotions containing gratuitous portrayals of bodily fluids or waste

Examples (non-exhaustive): Blood, guts, gore, sexual fluids, human or animal waste

• Promotions containing obscene or profane language

Examples (non-exhaustive): Swear or curse words, slurs relating to race or sexuality, variations and misspellings of profane language

Note: If the official name of your product, website, or app includes profane language, request a review and provide details of the name.

• Promotions that are likely to shock or scare

Examples (non-exhaustive): Promotions that suggest you may be in danger, be infected with a disease, or be the victim of a conspiracy

We appealed and we lucked-out. The Google employee who got the appeal is not a right-wing freak like the one who disallowed the ad (after, we assume, getting complaints from Republicans in the district. So the ad was up again. In the interim we made another version where we took out slides we thought might offend someone enough to claim they violated the policies. And sure enough, on Saturday, they disallowed the ad again!

Please take a look at it and tell us what you think is "shocking content." The ads only run in the candidates' respective districts. But you can see them all on the Blue America YouTube site

The music for the Julie Oliver ad, "Cussin' Trump," was created by two-time Grammy Award winner Gary Nicholson, who re-purposed his song "You Can't Listen When You're Talkin'" and gave it to us (gratis) to use to help our candidates. When Google pulled it down there were already 2,182 impressions and almost a quarter of them-- 517 people-- had watched at least 30 seconds. Blue America is charged $36.01 for that many views, a good deal. As of Saturday afternoon, over 4,000 people had watched at least 30 seconds of each of the other ads.

Right now 4,155 people have watched the Mike Siegel ad, 4,944 have watched the Liam O'Mara ad, 4,458 have watched the Kara Eastman ad. And we're determined to get the Julie Oliver ad back up-- as well as the Adam Christensen ad when it's finished. That's a lot of viewers and we're happy about the campaign, other than the arbitrary interference by Google. So far we've spent $436.17 on O'Mara, $437.08 on Eastman and $432.40 on Siegel. Amazing how close it is.

In any case, we fund these ad campaigns with the money contributors give to Blue America. We usually only ask for contributions for our I.E. (Independent Expenditure) Committee once a year. That's today. You can contribute by clicking here or on the 2020 IE thermometer on the right. You can also send a check to Blue America PAC, I.E. at PO Box 27201, Los Angeles, CA 90027. I always feel a little embarrassed asking for contributions that don't go directly to our candidates, mostly because I believe the candidates know how to spend contribution money better than we or anyone else. But Blue America is an all volunteer organization and over 95% of the contributions that come in are given to the candidates. We have some fun with the IEs-- billboards, TV and radio ads, newspaper ads and these Google ads. And we're always open to suggestions for how work more effectively and which candidates to concentrate on.

The contributions we get today will go to keep these ads running and to make ads for more candidates.

And by the way, one far right crackpot wrote this on his Facebook pageant we suspect he also complained to Google:

Congratulations Blue America on making the most inaccurate, hate filled, and ignorant ads on all of the internet! Wowzers Amazing, it is truly amazing how desperate the far left is to convince the world that Donald Trump is some kind of dishonorable freak. Most educated people can see straight through your lies and facades. You make the corrupt system, you convince people to do evil, and you convert people into hate filled individuals just like you are. Then you turn around and blame Trump and the police. A Blue America is a communistic satanic society hell bent on selfish extortion, that is no America. #TRUMP2020

This image is not in any of our ads

 

Did Google Just Bribe Devin Nunes? Business As Usual For Google And Nunes

California’s 22nd congressional district is one of the dwindling 7 still left in Republican hands-- and likely one of the next to fall. The relatively compact Central Valley district, starts up in the northern and eastern parts of the city of Fresno, includes Clovis, Reedley, Dinuba, Visalia, Exeter, Lindsay and Tulare. The district is primarily rural and includes parts of two counties, Fresno and Tulare. The PVI is R+8, the least red of the districts still held by a Republican in the state. There are only 3 California congressional districts with Republican PVIs held by Democrats-- CA-45 (R+3, Katie Porter), CA-48 (R+4, Harley Rouda) and CA-49 (R+1, Mike Levin).

By the numbers, it’s nearly impossible for a Democrat to win an R+8 district. There are just too many Republican voters and too few Democrats. CA-22, however could break the mold because of the controversial nature of the incumbent, crackpot and Trump patsy Devin Nunes. The district gave Obama (both times) and Hillary around 42% of its vote, but McCain took 55%, Romney got 56.6% but Trump just 52.1%. It’s not especially popular in the district.

Last cycle, the DCCC couldn’t have found a worse candidate-- a worthless, anti-charismatic conservative who is barely a Democrat, Andrew Janz, someone, had he won, may have joined Jeff Van Drew in jumping ship-- yes, another DCCC pile of garbage. The reasons he got any votes at all was:

• 2018’s anti-red wave
• The insane pro-Putin incumbent
• an obscene $9,064,633, entirely raised against Nunes

The Central Valley has been largely ignored by a Democratic Party controlled by coastal elites, both state-wise and nationally. Hispanics have not been registered and political organizing has been minimal and decidedly not progressive. The area needs a lot of help, the kind of work Kim Williams is doing in the blue 16th district, a Blue Dog stronghold where voters are just becoming aware of what the difference between a Democrat and a Republican even is. The DCCC found themselves a clone of Janz for 2020-- actually Janz recommended him-- Phil Arballo, a guy who is never going to beat Nunes unless someone finds a hi-def video of Nunes raping that cow he sued. So far this cycle Nunes has raised $5,678,450. The 3 Democrats taking him on are lucky to have raised a tenth of that combined:

Phil Arballo (DCCC conservative)- $380,762
Bobby Bliatout (moderate liberal)- $204,599
Dary Rezvani (progressive)- $76,886

Arballo is running an identity politics campaign on Republican-lite platform that is word-for-word all the pablum the DCCC feeds it’s dumb-bell candidates who can’t write their own pablum. Bobby Bliatout’s isn’t as bad, but isn’t that much better either-- just garden variety Democrat. Day Rezvani’s priorities page is the only one that could actually generate any of the kind of enthusiasm needed to win this kind of district by inspiring young people and non-voters.

Monday morning, Popular Information, Judd Legum’s popular newsletter, published a piece called Google’s Holiday Gift To Devin Nunes, about the pernicious impact of how corporations buy American politicians. “In November,” wrote Legum, “Congressman Devin Nunes (R-CA) was in the spotlight— the top Republican on the House Intelligence Committee, which was leading the impeachment inquiry into President Trump. He used his star turn to push "fantastical conspiracy theories" about Democrats. Nunes falsely accused Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff (D-CA) of trying to obtain nude photos of Trump. He promoted the discredited notion, advanced by Trump but rejected by the intelligence community, that Ukraine took significant steps to meddle in the 2016 election. The debunked contention is part of a broader Russian propaganda effort to absolve itself from hacking the DNC servers by pinning the blame on Ukraine. Nunes was warned during the hearings by Fiona Hill, a former member of the National Security Council, that he was legitimizing a Russian disinformation campaign. ‘I refuse to be part of an effort to legitimize an alternate narrative that the Ukrainian government is a U.S. adversary, and that Ukraine-- not Russia-- attacked us in 2016,’ Hill said. ‘In the course of this investigation, I would ask that you please not promote politically driven falsehoods that so clearly advance Russian interests.’ Nunes was undeterred.”

Nunes' antics during the impeachment hearings capped a year when he filed six defamation lawsuits, seeking hundreds of millions in damages from Twitter, a GOP political operative, media companies, a retired farmer, and a fictional cow. The suits were all filed by an attorney, Steven Biss, whose law license was suspended twice by the state of Virginia.

In response, Google quietly rewarded Nunes' behavior with a check for $5000 to help him get reelected. The donation was revealed in a little-noticed FEC report that was filed on December 20.

Google says its "mission is to make sure that information serves everyone." But it is supporting a Congressman who has emerged as one of the most powerful sources of disinformation in the country.

It is a vivid example of a much broader problem that Popular Information has documented extensively. There is a yawning gap between the publicly stated values of powerful corporations and their political activities. A paper published by Harvard Business School (HBS) this month concludes that corporations have "funded, perpetuated, and profited from political dysfunction."

Corporations have a massive influence on the electoral process. In 2018, corporate spending on federal elections was around $2.8 billion. At the state level, "public companies were the largest source of funding supporting partisan groups in state-level races, such as the Republican Governors Association and its Democratic counterpart."

One chapter of the Harvard paper surveyed HBS alumni and found a shocking level of ignorance about the influence of the corporations they work for on the political system.

When asked whether their own companies’ election spending distorted the democratic process, just 4% said yes, while 30% disagreed (27% strongly disagreed). A remarkable 61% responded to this question with “Not applicable” or “Don’t know.” 

The authors said the responses from HBS alumni "suggests either that many business leaders have little knowledge of their companies’ political involvement...or that alumni are unwilling or uncomfortable disclosing their companies’ involvement in elections."

But when asked about corporate involvement in politics generally, most HBS alumni agree that corporate political donations are deleterious and warp democracy.

[A]mong HBS alumni who were asked not about their own company but about business as a whole, 60% responded that companies should not have corporate PACs as a vehicle for employees to contribute to candidates the company supports. And 71% of these same alumni believed that the overall business community’s election spending distorted the democratic process.

In other words, HBS alumni believe that corporate political donations are a big problem-- but the company they work for is an exception.

Political donations are part of a corporate "playbook" of political activity that includes lobbying, spending on ballot initiatives, and hiring former government officials. Overall, HBS alumni view their own company's political involvement as largely positive while viewing the activities of all the other companies' political involvement negatively.

Notably, 62% of HBS alumni surveyed say that the business community overall "worsens the political system by advancing policies benefiting special interests," but just 21% are willing to say the same thing about their company.

While corporate influence campaigns are effectively securing tactical political victories that increase businesses' immediate bottom line, the Harvard study suggests that this strategy is backfiring over the long run. 

Based on our research, we believe that much of today’s business involvement in politics may actually be working against business’s longer-term interests. It is not enhancing our nation’s productivity and competitiveness, failing to put business’s weight behind sound public policies to enhance the U.S. business environment, advance shared prosperity among citizens, and improve the communities on which business depends.

This makes sense. Ingratiating yourself with people like Devin Nunes, for example, may help you preserve a valuable tax loophole for another year. After all, he has a vote. It's unlikely, however, that Nunes and his ilk will have any interest in creating a functional social, economic and regulatory environment.

Toward a new meaning of corporate responsibility

Nearly all corporations seek a positive public image, including demonstrating a commitment to creating social good. Up to this point, these efforts have "been in areas like reducing greenhouse gas emissions, improving employee health, and, more recently, paying a living wage and improving training and career development for lower-income workers." Politics has been separate. There is little effort to harmonize corporate political activities with commitments to public responsibility.

The Harvard study found a surprising willingness among HBS alumni to change the corporate political playbook. A strong majority of HBS alumni believe corporations should end political donations, spend less on lobbying, and stop trying to buy outcomes in ballot initiatives.

This circles back to a dynamic discussed earlier: most corporate employees are unaware (or unwilling to acknowledge) their own company's complicity in the problem. How many Google employees, for example, know their company gave Devin Nunes $5000 last month? Without that knowledge, an abstract willingness to change corporate practices overall will not translate to internal pressure for things to change at a particular company.

Knowledge is only part of the problem. Corporate insiders are often reluctant to speak out, believing that doing so could cost them their jobs.

The author of the Harvard study is proposing a "set of voluntary standards, which we believe every company should adopt when dealing with politics and government." But with so much money at stake, most corporations will not reorient their political activities without a fight. Change, if it does occur, will need to be a product of external and internal pressure.

Midnight Meme Of The Day!

by Noah

So Señor Trumpanzee has learned that when he searches google and other social media for "facts" that support his "achievements" and his far, far right conservative views, and even polls that show he is the "most popular president of all time, more popular than Lincoln" and loved by all, well, more often, much more often, the opposite information shows up. Trumpanzee finds that very bothersome and said so a few days ago. Damn if his computer doesn't reveal that reality has a liberal bias!

Poor little Trumpanzee. He thinks google should be just like his rallies, Republicans in congress, and his BFF Vladimir Putin. He thinks google should be a feedback loop of positive reenforcement and cheering for his mayhem. He thinks the entire internet is "rigged" against him.

It seems Doofus-in-Chief got his feelings crushed when, needing some of that positive reenforcement for all of the damage he is deliberately doing to America and the world, he sat down and started searching for his name and the alternative facts and delusions he believes in and those around him also believe in. You know, things like "global warming is a hoax" and the like. Betraying a complete lack of understanding about algorithms, he even thinks that google promotes President Obama's speeches over his. He's so deranged and paranoid that he probably thinks the word algorithm is a liberal plot against him because it says Al Gore.

Can't you just see him sitting at his computer and looking for proof that LeBron James and Maxine Waters have lower IQs than, not only his but that of any white person? Can't you just see him reaching for the phone to call Tucker Carlson or David Duke to ask them where they get their information? And, why would he do this when he has a whole staff of white supremacists? Hell, Stephen Miller, the pride of Duke University, is just down the hall. I guess Stephen must have been out to lunch.

Here's a thought, Donnie; next time you get the urge to google, why not avoid the frustration by following these three easy steps: 1) pull the computer power plug out of the outlet. 2) grab a metal fork. 3) While securely holding the fork, jam it into the outlet where the computer plug once was. You'll like Einstein in no time.

Violence and the State: A Prelude

by Gaius Publius

Every national instance of Rule by the Rich is accompanied by a great deal of violence, inflicted on the many by the few.

—Yours truly (paraphrased)

As you ponder the criticism of the Antifa ("anti-fascist") movement for engaging in violent tactics in Berkeley, consider the following.

▪ This is violence.

"The scene in Berkeley on Sunday" (source). Photo: Marcus Yam/LA Times via Getty Images

▪ This is violence.

To justify Bush's numerous rights violations, at home and abroad, James Comey turned Jose Padilla's brain "to jello" (image source).

According to Rick Perlstein:

James Comey, currently sailing smoothly through Senate Judiciary Committee hearings for confirmation as chief of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, was ... in charge, and proudly so, of a “terrorism” case that began with a detention without charges, continued with made-up and spurious charges, and ended with a conviction won against an American [Jose Padilla] whose treatment during confinement (on the American mainland) turned his brain to jello...

▪ This is violence.

"The 350-acre Horse Prairie Fire is burning outside of Olalla [Oregon] on Saturday night and is zero percent contained" (source). Photo courtesy of Kyle Reed

A look at the headlines:

Los Angeles wildfires: City battles 'largest fire in history'

British Columbia is having its worst wildfire season in recorded history.

After burning for months, Montana looks like a fiery apocalypse.

Rain in Seattle is normal. Raining ash, however, is not.

We are in, to quote Randall Amster, a "new normal of destabilization," created by a political world in which both parties, Democrats and Republicans alike, out of service to fossil fuel billionaires and the companies they control, refuse in varying degrees to treat global warming as already a national emergency, one that requires, first and foremost, a transition to zero use of fossil fuels at the fastest possible rate if we hope in any way to alter the deadly and destructive path of what's already started happening to us.

▪ And this is violence.

"An alternate transportation network of private buses—fully equipped with wifi—thus threads daily through San Francisco, picking up workers at unmarked bus stops (though many coexist in digital space), carrying them southward via the commuter lanes of the 101 and 280 freeways, and eventually delivers them to their campuses" (source).

According to the SF Examiner, "Right now the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency charges companies serving multi-billion dollar technology companies $3.67 per stop event, what some critics have called a 'pittance.'"

The city gets a pittance for each "stop event" by these private busses, while the city's non-high-tech-connected citizens get no right at all to ride them. A two-tiered world of transportation, in other words, sanctioned and welcomed by government and financed in large part by tax dollars.

One more wealth transfer among a great many. A gift given to the few (our "future-seeing" high tech billionaires) to sweeten their bottom lines by making their jobs as attractive to their workers as possible. A gift paid from the pockets of the many to whom the service is unavailable.

The Violence of the State

Every national instance of Rule by the Rich is accompanied by a great deal of violence, inflicted on the many by the few.

Consider just the examples above.

The violence of torture and death, inflicted at home and abroad, by the state on the innocent, all so the state can appear to be something it's not, all so its ruling elites can stay in power.

The violence of climate chaos, inflicted by a national government which for decades has refused to act in any real way to lessen the coming costly horrible climate blows. (Of all major candidates, only Sanders was serious about climate mitigation.)

The violence of near-slavish service to increasing income inequality, again by both parties, a service that brought us the failed revolt we now call the 2016 election and its disastrous aftermath — a revolt, by the way, which is not going away no matter which party takes power.

Consider all this as you ponder the critics of the Antifa ("anti-fascist") movement and the call by those same elites (example: Nancy Pelosi in the quote above) for a return to the state-only violence they call "order."

Whose hands are clean? Whose violence does greater harm?

GP
 

Diversity Vs Free Speech At Google

Google had a good idea. They're trying to encourage diversity in hiring and the company suggested employees use an internal electronic bulletin board for a company-wide discussion. Then they fired someone who discussed.

I remember when I would sit through executive meetings at Warner Bros Records at one point and marvel at how few women and young people and people of color there were around the table. It wasn't just that women and young people and people of color were the bulk of our customers, but that it was tedious, stifling and soul-killing to be in a room filled mostly with old white men for hours on end every week. There was resistance to change-- primarily from old white men but there was a commitment at the top of the company to change and eventually-- and slowly-- it did... a bit.

A friend of mine who works in a top tech firm in Silicon Valley told me about the Google mess. He seemed to be enjoying a rival's distress. The distress started when a male engineer shared a long sexist, anti-diversity screed, "Google’s Ideological Echo Chamber," with Google employees. His point, the kind of right-wing perspective anyone who spends time watching FOX News would take as a matter of course is that women are underrepresented in Silicon Valley not because they face bias and discrimination in the technology world but because of "inherent" psychological differences between men and women. The author immediately portrays himself as the victim in "our culture of shaming and misrepresentation [that] is disrespectful and unaccepting of anyone outside its echo chamber." He insists that "alienating conservatives is both non-inclusive and generally bad business because conservatives tend to be higher in conscientiousness, which is require for much of the drudgery and maintenance work characteristic of a mature company." He lists 6 bullet points that comes straight from mindless libertarian orthodoxy:

• Google’s political bias has equated the freedom from offense with psychological safety, but shaming into silence is the antithesis of psychological safety.
• This silencing has created an ideological echo chamber where some ideas are too sacred to be honestly discussed.
• The lack of discussion fosters the most extreme and authoritarian elements of this ideology.
• Extreme: all disparities in representation are due to oppression
• Authoritarian: we should discriminate to correct for this oppression
• Differences in distributions of traits between men and women may in part explain why we don’t have 50% representation of women in tech and leadership. Discrimination to reach equal representation is unfair, divisive, and bad for business.

"At Google," he wrote, "we talk so much about unconscious bias as it applies to race and gender, but we rarely discuss our moral biases. Political orientation is actually a result of deep moral preferences and thus biases. Considering that the overwhelming majority of the social sciences, media, and Google lean left, we should critically examine these prejudices... At Google, we’re regularly told that implicit (unconscious) and explicit biases are holding women back in tech and leadership. Of course, men and women experience bias, tech, and the workplace differently and we should be cognizant of this, but it’s far from the whole story.

On average, men and women biologically differ in many ways. These differences aren’t just socially constructed because:

• They’re universal across human cultures
• They often have clear biological causes and links to prenatal testosterone
• Biological males that were castrated at birth and raised as females often still identify and act like males
• The underlying traits are highly heritable
• They’re exactly what we would predict from an evolutionary psychology perspective

When I first started reading about this story, I was horrified Google fired this guy. Eventually I realized that he needs to see a psychiatrist STAT and that it would have been a dereliction of duty for Google to keep him around normally functioning employees. This is coming from a very, very sick mind straight out of the Republican Party. His fear and hatred of women is frightening-- and far from atypical. He claims women are more directed towards "feelings and aesthetics rather than ideas" and that partially explains why "women relatively prefer jobs in social or artistic areas. More men may like coding because it requires systemizing and even within SWEs, comparatively more women work on front end, which deals with both people and aesthetics. He claims "Neuroticism (higher anxiety, lower stress tolerance)... may contribute to the higher levels of anxiety women report on Googlegeist and to the lower number of women in high stress jobs" and that "women generally hav[e] a harder time negotiating salary, asking for raises, speaking up, and leading. Note that these are just average differences and there’s overlap between men and women, but this is seen solely as a women’s issue. This leads to exclusory programs like Stretch and swaths of men without support."

This is followed by all the regular Bronze Age patriarchal bullshit brought forward into the Silicon Valley miniverse. "We always ask why we don’t see women in top leadership positions, but we never ask why we see so many men in these jobs. These positions often require long, stressful hours that may not be worth it if you want a balanced and fulfilling life. Status is the primary metric that men are judged on[4], pushing many men into these higher paying, less satisfying jobs for the status that they entail. Note, the same forces that lead men into high pay/high stress jobs in tech and leadership cause men to take undesirable and dangerous jobs like coal mining, garbage collection, and firefighting, and suffer 93% of work-related deaths." it never ends and it's almost painful to read his baseless drivel but Danielle Brown, Google’s VP of Diversity, Integrity & Governance tried responding in an internal memo to employees:

Many of you have read an internal document shared by someone in our engineering organization, expressing views on the natural abilities and characteristics of different genders, as well as whether one can speak freely of these things at Google. And like many of you, I found that it advanced incorrect assumptions about gender. I’m not going to link to it here as it’s not a viewpoint that I or this company endorses, promotes or encourages.

Diversity and inclusion are a fundamental part of our values and the culture we continue to cultivate. We are unequivocal in our belief that diversity and inclusion are critical to our success as a company, and we’ll continue to stand for that and be committed to it for the long haul. As Ari Balogh said in his internal G+ post, "Building an open, inclusive environment is core to who we are, and the right thing to do. ‘Nuff said."

Google has taken a strong stand on this issue, by releasing its demographic data and creating a company wide OKR on diversity and inclusion. Strong stands elicit strong reactions. Changing a culture is hard, and it’s often uncomfortable. But I firmly believe Google is doing the right thing, and that’s why I took this job.

Part of building an open, inclusive environment means fostering a culture in which those with alternative views, including different political views, feel safe sharing their opinions. But that discourse needs to work alongside the principles of equal employment found in our Code of Conduct, policies, and anti-discrimination laws.

We asked Ro Khanna (D-CA), the thoughtful and progressive congressman who represents Silicon Valley, for his perspective on the controversy in his own backyard. Here's what he sent us:

James Damore’s appalling and sexist memo, which claimed that women’s biology explains their lack of leadership opportunities, highlights how far the tech community needs to go to address gender and racial stereotypes. I was moved by Susan Wojcicki’s personal essay in response to that memo and appreciate that so many tech leaders are speaking out against Damore’s ignorant views. I am also pleased to see Google’s recent partnership with Howard University and other historically black colleges and universities (HBCUs) to take real steps on improving diversity in the tech industry.

As a company with an immigrant founder, an immigrant CEO, and prominent women leaders, Google should strive to set the standard for diversity in the workplace.

Workplace diversity is an issue that all of us have to be more aware of and work hard to correct. Most of us have implicit biases or blind spots that we need to recognize and take steps to overcome. Building diversity in the face of historical inequities is not easy. It requires conscious effort and hard work from all of us who have positions of power or responsibility.

My hope is that this incident will inspire thoughtful men and women at Google to redouble their effort in building a Valley where people truly have equal opportunity regardless of race, gender, or faith. Anything less would be unworthy of the Valley’s core values and principles.

James Damore, the fired Google engineer, is already a hero in certain predictable circles. This one is as incredible as it is twisted:

Google Scores a Pro-Monopoly Seat on Trump Transition Team

 Google says "Don't be evil." Look for their name as the third to sign on to NSA spying.

by Gaius Publius

Yes, we're talking about that Google and that Trump. Just two points first, before we look at Dave Dayen's report of the news.

The Cult of the High-Tech Billionaire

First, a little context. We on the hipster left, along with many others in the non-political culture, tend to think of the billionaire high-tech founder and CEO as special, as a seer into the future and a builder of the world of the future — the world of driverless cars, the "gig economy" that powers "disrupted" industries, and especially the world of mobile smart devices that give us undreamed-of ways of "connected" interacting (and new ways of getting fabulously rich in an ironically breaking world).

This is perfectly analogous to the early 20th century and post-World War I "cult of the airman," which lionized such people as Charles Lindbergh and Amelia Earhart as not only possessing special skills and bravery, but a special futurist vision as well (emphasis mine throughout):

Modern aviation and abstract art emerged almost simultaneously at the turn of the 20th century, and were self-consciously twinned from the outset. ‘Notre Avenir est dans l’Air’ (Our Future is in the Air), declared a painted pamphlet on one of Picasso’s Cubist table-tops from 1912 – the original was issued by Michelin to raise funds for France’s aviation programme. Since the Wright brothers debuted their biplane near the French town of Le Mans in 1908, Picasso and Braque had taken to calling themselves ‘Wilbur’ and ‘Orville’, enjoying the metaphor as they cut their art loose from the restraints of linear perspective. Modernists in other countries also made early bids for the skies: Marinetti, in his first Futurist manifesto of 1909, rounded off a long list of praiseworthy inventions with the aeroplane; Malevich, who launched Suprematism in 1915, spoke of ‘an urge to take off from the Earth’.

"An urge to take off from the Earth," to fly into the future, to rise above the petty and see the whole at once instead of just the parts. And the "airmen" — just pilots, really, but people who did rise above the petty and, looking down, did see the whole from the air — were to lead the way:

This contradiction between the glamour of flight as a feat in itself, and the danger of a world opened up to the aerial gaze, was one of the defining features of aerial art in the interwar years. Public enthusiasm for flight was undiminished, and well provided for, as ex-servicemen opened or joined entrepreneurial new businesses – air transport, air mail, and air shows among them. Flight could make celebrities of its pioneers. In 1932, Walter Sickert painted Miss Earhart’s Arrival from a photograph in the Daily Sketch; shown on her arrival at Hanworth Air Park in Middlesex, the popular aviator is almost lost in the crowd of well-wishers braving the rain to celebrate her solo crossing of the Atlantic.

The cult of the airman placed aviators symbolically – as well as geographically – at a godlike remove from those on the ground:

The cult of the airman developed during the war as an heroic counter to the squalid and anonymous war in the trenches. It contained three features: a belief in the dynamic power of flying, an illusion of the airman as a hero and a militarist recognition of the potentially offensive use of the aeroplane.

That terribly mistaken belief in the "airman as hero" is one of the reasons Charles Lindbergh, a leader of the pre-World War II America First movement, and an avowed racist, had such a following in his post-pilot years (and the reason Philip Roth made Lindbergh the Trump-like president in his alternate history novel, The Plot Against America).

And now we're at it again, looking to men and women (but mostly men) with special skills to show us the future (and by the way, unlock for us the secret of getting exceptionally rich). In this case, the heroes are men like the farseeing Steve Jobs and and his much worshiped, and imagined, hipster ideas:

Also men like search-engine billionaire Eric Schmidt and his hipster slogan, Don't Be Evil. Modern heroes.

High-Tech Billionaires Are "Our" Billionaires

The second point before we go to Dayen's article is this — that high-tech billionaires are "ours," are somehow the property of the Democratic Party and an offset to "their" billionaires, like Charles and David Koch or Robert Mercer. We on the left naturally assume that the Silicon Valley rich are ours because they are more culturally advanced (less anti-gay, for example), run companies that deploy what appear to be worker-friendly policies, and in general contribute to Democrats more than to Republicans.

"Our" billionaires will therefore stand by us and can be used as leverage against "their" billionaires, as when Silicon Valley companies helped fight off the genuine evils of Internet-neutering bills like SOPA and PIPA.

We generally feel good about "our" billionaires — not only are they Democrats, they're seers, like Steve Jobs, like ourselves. We were therefore hardly surprised that the Silicon Valley rich, like Eric Schmidt, were generally big Hillary Clinton supporters, even in the primary against Bernie Sanders:

A newly published batch of stolen emails shows a close relationship between Google and members of Hillary Clinton's campaign staff.

The private emails were apparently stolen from John Podesta, Hillary Clinton's campaign chair, and published by WikiLeaks. They contain several references to Google and its parent company Alphabet's executive chairman, Eric Schmidt.

The emails reveal a relationship with Schmidt dating back to at least 2008 and show that Google loaned its jet to members of Clinton's campaign staff on several occasions.

According to a February 2015 email to Podesta from Tina Flournoy — who serves as Bill Clinton's chief of staff — Google planned to lend its company jet for a trip to Africa. Podesta wrote, "FYI. They are donating the Google plane for the Africa trip."

There was a widely circulated Politico picture of Eric Schmidt wearing a "staff" badge at Clinton's election night "victory" party. Schmidt must surely be one of the good ones, a Democrat if not a progressive, and one of those who "get it."

Of course, Hollywood billionaires, like Steven Spielberg, are also big Democratic Party supporters, but they aren't lionized these days the way the modern far-seeing "airmen of today" — the hyper-successful founders of high-tech start-up companies — are lionized.

To fully appreciate that, look again at the Steve Jobs book cover above, consider the lines outside Apple stores when a new iPhone is released, and look carefully at the cultivated hipster look of the many store agents. I called the hipster look "cultivated" not because the agents aren't who they appear to be, but because they are hired because that's exactly who they are — tech-savvy hipsters, just like you, just like Apple, just like its founders.

This combination — the "cult of the futurist high-tech billionaire" coupled with their supposed Democratic leanings — blinds us to what we're actually looking at, just as the "cult of the airman" blinded many in the 1920s and 1930s to what they were seeing.

There's an important difference, though, between then and now. In the early part of the 20th century, the airmen (and women) were ordinary people with a skill. In our century, the "futurists" we idolize are also among the most wealthy and powerful men and women on earth — in a very real sense no different at all than Charles and David Koch — with all that that implies. Amelia Earhart didn't live for wealth and power. High-tech billionaires like Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg most certainly do.

We're not just being fooled by our hero-worship; we're being had by it as well.

With the two points above as context, let's now read David Dayen.

Google and Trump, Together At Last

At The Intercept, Dayen writes (my emphasis):

Google Gets a Seat on the Trump Transition Team

Google is among the many major corporations whose surrogates are getting key roles on Donald Trump’s transition team.

Joshua Wright has been put in charge of transition efforts at the influential Federal Trade Commission [FTC] after pulling off the rare revolving-door quadruple-play, moving from Google-supported academic work to government – as an FTC commissioner – back to the Google gravy train and now back to the government.

The Intercept has documented how Wright, as a law professor at George Mason University, received Google funding for at least four academic papers, all of which supported Google’s position that it did not violate antitrust laws when it favored its own sites in search engine requests and restricted advertisers from running ads on competitors. George Mason received $762,000 in funding from Google from 2011 to 2013.

Wright then became an FTC commissioner in January 2013, agreeing to recuse himself from Google cases for two years, because of his Google-funded research. He lasted at the FTC until August 2015, returning to George Mason’s law school (now named after Antonin Scalia). But Wright also became an “of counsel” at Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati, Google’s main outside law firm. Wilson Sonsini has represented Google before the FTC.

Wright’s leadership position in the Trump FTC transition flips him back into government work....

Why is the FTC so important? The FTC "has responsibilities over consumer protection and policing anti-competitive business practices, like the employing of monopoly power. Outside of the Justice Department’s Antitrust Division, no government agency is more responsible for competition policy than the FTC."

Score one for the google. They appear to have joined forces with Trump to make sure no high-tech billionaire is harmed in the relentless march toward monopolistic capitalism. Are they still "our" billionaires, or just their own?

Don't Be Evil indeed.

GP
  

Ownership Of Self Isn't That Hard A Concept-- And You Better Start Understanding It

Politically savvy Angelenos are excited that we don't have to always face east-- towards Jerry Nadler (D-NY), Justin Amash (R-MI) and Alan Grayson (D-FL)-- when we're looking for a champion of civil liberties. We have our own: Ted Lieu in the Pacific coast district that goes from up in Malibu, down through Santa Monica, Venice, El Segundo, Manhattan Beach, Hermosa Beach, Redondo Beach and past Rancho Palos Verdes, AKA "Silicon Beach," a hub of technological entrepreneurship based on Southern California's traditional valuing of independent minds and its dominant small business ethos. Lately, it's been Lieu standing up in Congress for the personal privacy issues that are redefining the new technological era.

Aral Balkan-- the guy in the video up top-- should get together with Congressman Lieu for a discussion of the nature of the self in the digital age. Balkan wrote an OpEd for Zeit Online based on an exploration of how the nature of "ownership of self" is changing.

The nature of modern technology

Your smart television, the watch on your wrist, your kid’s new Barbie doll and the car that you drive (drives you?) all have one thing in common: they all work by gathering data-- personal information-- about you, your friends, and your family.

While this might sound creepy in and of itself, it is not the real problem.

Modern technology works by collecting swathes of (often personal) data. This is simply a fact of life. We’re not going to change that.

The important question is this: who owns and controls the data about you and the mechanisms by which it is collected, analysed, and transformed into useful services?

If the answer to this question is "I do" then we don’t have a problem. In such a world, technology would work to empower individuals with greater information about themselves and the world around them and translate that information into useful superpowers.

Sadly, we do not live in that world.

Today, the answer to the question is that multinational corporations like Google and Facebook own and control both your personal data and the means of collecting, analysing, and deriving value from it.

This is a socio-techno-economical state that Shoshana Zuboff of the Harvard Business School calls Surveillance Capitalism.

To understand why Surveillance Capitalism is so problematic, we must first understand two fundamental concepts: the nature of the self and the nature of data in the digital age.

The nature of the self in the digital age

According to Steve Krug, author of Don’t Make Me Think, any well-designed technology should play the role of a butler when interacting with a human being. Say I want to remember something for later and I have my smart phone with me. The conversation between us could go something like this:

Me: Butler, remember this for later.

My phone: Sure, sir, I’ve noted it down in the Notes app for you.

Me: Thank you.

In fact, with technologies like Siri, you can have this exact same conversation today.

This is the mainstream way of viewing our relationship to technology: as the conversation between two actors. In this case, me and my phone. If this is how we see technology, surveillance is signals capture between two actors. This is no different to what the Stasi did when they bugged your home and listened in on your conversations. It’s not nice but it is what surveillance traditionally has been.

But what if this is not the nature of our relationship with technology?

What if, when I write down a thought on my phone to remember it later, what I am actually doing is extending my mind, and thereby extending my self using the phone.

Today, we are all cyborgs. This is not to say that we implant ourselves with technology but that we extend our biological capabilities using technology. We are sharded beings; with parts of our selves spread across and augmented by our everyday things.

Perhaps it is time to extend the boundaries of the self to include the technologies by which we extend our selves.

If this is how we begin to see our everyday things – not as separate actors but as extensions of our selves-- then several things become very clear:

Firstly, surveillance no longer becomes signals capture but a violation of the self. Consider the current Apple vs FBI case where the FBI wants to set a precedent so that they can access anyone’s phone. I’ve heard the request likened to a request by law enforcement to access a safe [NPR]. Nothing could be further from the truth. My iPhone is not like a safe any more than my brain is like a safe. It is a part of my self. In which case, if you want to get into my iPhone, what you really want to do is to violate my self. This is an assault on the self. And we already have a rich body of laws and regulations that protect the sanctity of the self and the rights of human beings.

Secondly, it becomes clear that we don’t need to concoct a new Internet Bill of Rights or a Magna Carta for the Web or any such nonsense: all we need to do is to apply the Universal Declaration of Human Rights-- the human rights we already have-- to the digital era. There isn’t a digital world and a real world. There isn’t human rights and “digital rights.” The things that we are talking about are one and the same.

And, finally, we can begin to understand the true nature of those who peddle in our personal data and start to effectively regulate this egregious practice.

But first, we must also understand the nature of data.

The nature of data

We often hear data referred to as a valuable asset. According to Wired magazine, it is the new oil. It is only because we do not understand the true nature of data that we are not absolutely repulsed by such a comparison.

Let me illustrate:

Say I have a small figurine. If I have enough data about this figurine, I can take a 3D printer and I can create an exact copy of it. Now imagine what I can do if I have enough data about you. Data about a thing, if you have enough of it, becomes the thing.

Data about you is you.

Personal data isn’t the new oil, personal data is people.

Now this is not to say that Google, Facebook, and the countless other startups in the cult of Silicon Valley want to 3D print you. No, of course not. They simply want to profile you. To simulate you. For profit.

The business model of surveillance capitalism-- the business model of Google, Facebook, and countless other Silicon Valley startups-- is to monetise human beings. We all know that Facebook and Google operate huge server farms. Have you ever stopped to ask yourself what it is, exactly, that they are farming? Because if you do, you might quickly come to the conclusion to that is it us. What are Google and Facebook if not factory farms for human beings?

If this sounds familiar, it should: we have been practising variations of this business model for a very long time.

We call the very lucrative and yet dispicable business of selling people’s bodies "slavery." The business model of mainstream technology today is to monetise everything about you that makes you who are apart from your body. What should we call this?

We have a shameful history of selling people. Today, the business model of mainstream technology is to sell everything about you that makes you who you are apart from your physical body. What should we call that?

This isn’t a technology problem…

The modern-day system of colonialism and sharecropping being constructed by the new East India Company that is Silicon Valley isn’t uncouth or stupid enough to put people in physical shackles. It doesn’t want to own your body, it is content with owning your simulation. And yet, as we have already seen, the more data they have about you-- the higher the fidelity of your simulation-- the closer they are to owning you.

Your simulation is not a static thing either-- it is a living, breathing construct (in algorithms, if not biological cells). It lives in the labs of Google, Inc., and Facebook, Inc., and is constantly subject to hundreds if not thousands of experiments aimed to analyse and better understand you. These are the sort of experiments which, if they were performed on your captive physical person, would land the executives at these companies in prison for crimes against humanity.

All of this personal information, and the wealth of insight derived from it, belong to the corporations and, by extension (as Edward Snowden has shown us), are shared with governments.

This creates a huge power differential between individuals and corporations and between individuals and their governments.

If I take a camcorder and walk into Google, Inc, I will be arrested. However, Google records countless homes with its Nest cameras. The world of Surveillance Capitalism is one in which those who have a right to privacy-- individuals-- do not have it while those who should be transparent-- corporations and democratic governments-- do.

When Mark Zuckerberg says "privacy is dead," he’s only talking about your privacy, not his. When he buys a house, he buys the houses on both sides also. His privacy, the privacy of Facebook, Inc., and the privacy of your government are still very much alive and well.

If this doesn’t sound like democracy, it is because it is not. Surveillance Capitalism isn’t compatible with democracy.

The system we live in today can best be described as a corporatocracy; a feudalism of corporations.

Ours is a neo-colonial age of multinational monopolies.

A digital imperialism, if you will.

The rise of corporatocracy is our reward for decades of unchecked neoliberalism and Californian ideology. It brings with it an unparalleled level of systemic inequality that has resulted in 62 people having as much wealth as half of the world’s poorest population combined (that’s 3.5 billion people). It carries alongside it the wholesale destruction of our habitat through resource depletion and climate change. It is, to put it bluntly, an existential threat for our species.

This is not a technology problem.

It is a capitalism problem.

And the answer is better, stronger democracy.

Decentralised, zero-knowledge alternative technologies can play an important role is helping us achieve better civil liberties and democracy but technology is not a silver bullet. Without regulatory and statutory changes, those technologies will simply be deemed illegal and those of us who build them will become the new Snowdens and Mannings.

Our challenge is great: The alternatives that we create must be convenient and accessible. They must be ethically designed and non-colonial in nature. This is no small task. But neither is it infeasible. I know because I am first-hand coding such alternatives today (and others are, also).

The battle for our civil liberties and democracy will be fought with our new everyday things. The outcome will determine whether we remain quantified serfs toiling in a digital feudalism or whether we live as free citizens, empowered by technology that we own and control as individuals to explore the potential of our species in the stars.

I wish and work for the latter future.

I hope you will, also.

Google CEO Eric Schmidt wasn't joking around when he said "If you have something you don't want everyone to know, maybe you shouldn't be doing it in the first place." He was dead serious. Let's make sure we do what we can to keep Ted Lieu in Congress:

Pie (and Google) Watch: DWT commenters, have you had to solve the deadly Google Pie Perplex? Sorry, that's Google, not us!

by Ken

Usually when I want to add a comment to a post, since I'm already logged into the Blogspot software it knows who I am, and even addresses me by name, or at least the name it knows me by, but even so it asks me to prove that I'm not a robot. Usually I think I can bypass this, which is helpful if I'm not feeling confident about proving my non-roboticity, but when it was just your old-style "captcha," where you just type in a few letters or numbers -- the only problem being that, as we all know, the numbers and letters are frequently stylized into illegibility.

Suddenly today I was confronted by the above mega-captcha, what I think of as a giant Google Pie Perplex. I've spent a fair amount of time looking at this thing, and I'm still not sure I could get through this if I had to.

TO EXPLAIN MY PERPLEXITY --

Let's first number the Possibly Pie Illustrations from 1 to 10, starting with the slice of pie (cherry, would you say?) at the top right as No. 1, then continuing with the rows as Nos. 2-4, 5-7, and 8-10, left to right. On preliminary examination, three of the 10 specimens can be dealt with easily. No. 1 may not look terribly appetizing, but it seems almost certainly pie. Clearly No. 9 is watermelon; I suppose for our purposes we don't need to concern ourselves with why what has been done to it has been done to it. No. 4 also seems an easy call; it could be peanuts, or it could be larvae, but whatever the heck it is, it's hard to see how it could be pie.

I would apply basically the same reasoning to No. 3, which in this poor-quality thumbnail looks kind of like a bunch of fresh-out-of-the-oven loaves of bread. It could be other sorts of similarly shaped baked goods, but I'm hard put to get "Pie" out of it.

It would appear that, in addition to No. 1, the leading candidates are Nos. 2 and 10. No. 2 actually appears to be sitting in a pie tin, and since that could certainly be a crumble top we're looking at, I would be inclined to put this on my Pie List. I'm a lot less sure about No. 10, though. Yes, it's round and flattish, certainly pie qualities, but that top surface doesn't look very pie-like, does it? It has more of a brioche-y or babka-esque look, no?

Certainly a case could be made for No. 7. If we accept the top of No. 2 as a crumble pie top, can we be sure that in No. 7 that isn't some sort of lattice top? Of course with No. 7 we don't have, as we do with No. 2, the reassuring size and shape of pie-ness, and I don't know what exactly the latticework of No. 7 is sitting on top of, but I'm far from sure that we can with certainty put this on our "Not Pie" list.

No. 8 seems clearly a cake, but I worry about this too, keeping in mind the example of Boston cream pie.

Yeah, you could cut me a slice of this Boston cream pie.

No. 8 doesn't necessarily look like even a modern adaptation of the classic BCP (yum!), though again I don't think we can rule this out. And what about the possibility of some other sort of confection analogous to a BCP? I don't happen to be familiar with any known varieties, but that isn't to say that there aren't any. Or it could just be some baker's takeoff on the concept. Of course a BCP itself is in fact a cake rather than a pie, but it's got pie right there in the name: Boston cream pie. If there were an image of an actual BCP, would that go on the "Pie" or "Not Pie" list? Would you want your captcha-plus life to depend on getting the call right?

Which leaves Nos. 5 and 6, and I can't say that I see any pie in either. But then, I'd have a tough time saying what it is that I do see, and No. 5 in particular has so much going on in it that I would hardly be flabbergasted to learn that somewhere in there there's pie of some sort. This seems less likely with No. 6, which I'm almost prepared to put on the "Not Pie" list, but that leaves enough questions that I'm not feeling terribly confident with my pie scorecard.

Frankly, I don't know what all to make of this assemblage. Somebody presumably thought it would be clever as well as functional, which on my scorecard makes that someone 0-2. As a matter of fact, I've changed my mind, and think I would like an explanation after all for why that heart-shaped chunk was cut out of the slice of watermelon -- and then left right beside it. I'm not sure we dare leave these questions unasked, considering where this sort of behavior might leave if left unchecked.

#

Google folds itself into a new "entity" called "Alphabet" -- in search of new ways to suck?

A sneak peek at the planned logo for "Alphabet," the
"collection of companies" Google has folded itself into

"Google now touches nearly every aspect of Internet connected life thanks to its search engine, e-mail service, YouTube and Android smartphone operating system. But it's also turned its eye away from those core products to try and answer the larger questions about what technology can do for society at large."

-- Hayley Tsukayama, Washington Post consumer-technology
writer, in "Google becomes part of a new company, Alphabet"

by Ken

Time for a quick question, Hayley? Up there where you say that Google has "also turned its eye away from those core products to try and answer the larger questions about what technology can do for society at large," you didn't by chance mean that Google wants to answer the larger questions about what technology can do to society, did you? Okay, just asking. I guess this is the way the Googleberries think of it -- or rather the Alphabetniks, I guess we should call them, now that Google is merely part of "Alphabet," which is Google but oh-so-much more. Heaven help us.

Okay, I'm hardly a disinterested observer. I've made no secret of the fact that I think Google sucks. Why, I've even offered helpful corporate slogans to goose the brand, like "GOOGLE: The G stands for Crappy." No compensation required.

The obvious question, now that Google has created this larger entity to, er, include itself (and, as we shall see, the Alphabet People are by and large the Same Old Google People -- only, you know, grander, maybe more metaphysical), can the new entity be said to pre-suck?

If you haven't heard the news, you may not know what I'm talking about. Here's the short version, courtesy of the Washington Post's above-referenced Hayley Tsukayama:

Google chief executive Larry Page on Monday announced that the tech giant is undergoing a major restructuring and will become a wholly owned subsidiary of a new conglomerate known as Alphabet.

The move, Page said, will allow Google to focus more on its core products, including its search engine, while Alphabet manages a variety of different businesses, from driver-less cars to drones.

And here's the long version, from the horse's mouth, as it were, Google Alphabet CEO Larry Page:

G is for Google

Posted: Monday, August 10, 2015

As Sergey and I wrote in the original founders letter 11 years ago, “Google is not a conventional company. We do not intend to become one.” As part of that, we also said that you could expect us to make “smaller bets in areas that might seem very speculative or even strange when compared to our current businesses.” From the start, we’ve always strived to do more, and to do important and meaningful things with the resources we have.

We did a lot of things that seemed crazy at the time. Many of those crazy things now have over a billion users, like Google Maps, YouTube, Chrome, and Android. And we haven’t stopped there. We are still trying to do things other people think are crazy but we are super excited about.

We’ve long believed that over time companies tend to get comfortable doing the same thing, just making incremental changes. But in the technology industry, where revolutionary ideas drive the next big growth areas, you need to be a bit uncomfortable to stay relevant.

Our company is operating well today, but we think we can make it cleaner and more accountable. So we are creating a new company, called Alphabet (http://abc.xyz). I am really excited to be running Alphabet as CEO with help from my capable partner, Sergey, as President.

What is Alphabet? Alphabet is mostly a collection of companies. The largest of which, of course, is Google. This newer Google is a bit slimmed down, with the companies that are pretty far afield of our main Internet products contained in Alphabet instead. What do we mean by far afield? Good examples are our health efforts: Life Sciences (that works on the glucose-sensing contact lens), and Calico (focused on longevity). Fundamentally, we believe this allows us more management scale, as we can run things independently that aren’t very related. Alphabet is about businesses prospering through strong leaders and independence. In general, our model is to have a strong CEO who runs each business, with Sergey and me in service to them as needed. We will rigorously handle capital allocation and work to make sure each business is executing well. We'll also make sure we have a great CEO for each business, and we’ll determine their compensation. In addition, with this new structure we plan to implement segment reporting for our Q4 results, where Google financials will be provided separately than those for the rest of Alphabet businesses as a whole.

This new structure will allow us to keep tremendous focus on the extraordinary opportunities we have inside of Google. A key part of this is Sundar Pichai. Sundar has been saying the things I would have said (and sometimes better!) for quite some time now, and I’ve been tremendously enjoying our work together. He has really stepped up since October of last year, when he took on product and engineering responsibility for our Internet businesses. Sergey and I have been super excited about his progress and dedication to the company. And it is clear to us and our board that it is time for Sundar to be CEO of Google. I feel very fortunate to have someone as talented as he is to run the slightly slimmed down Google and this frees up time for me to continue to scale our aspirations. I have been spending quite a bit of time with Sundar, helping him and the company in any way I can, and I will of course continue to do that. Google itself is also making all sorts of new products, and I know Sundar will always be focused on innovation -- continuing to stretch boundaries. I know he deeply cares that we can continue to make big strides on our core mission to organize the world's information. Recent launches like Google Photos and Google Now using machine learning are amazing progress. Google also has some services that are run with their own identity, like YouTube. Susan is doing a great job as CEO, running a strong brand and driving incredible growth.

Sergey and I are seriously in the business of starting new things. Alphabet will also include our X lab, which incubates new efforts like Wing, our drone delivery effort. We are also stoked about growing our investment arms, Ventures and Capital, as part of this new structure.

Alphabet Inc. will replace Google Inc. as the publicly-traded entity and all shares of Google will automatically convert into the same number of shares of Alphabet, with all of the same rights. Google will become a wholly-owned subsidiary of Alphabet. Our two classes of shares will continue to trade on Nasdaq as GOOGL and GOOG.

For Sergey and me this is a very exciting new chapter in the life of Google -- the birth of Alphabet. We liked the name Alphabet because it means a collection of letters that represent language, one of humanity's most important innovations, and is the core of how we index with Google search! We also like that it means alpha-bet (Alpha is investment return above benchmark), which we strive for! I should add that we are not intending for this to be a big consumer brand with related products--the whole point is that Alphabet companies should have independence and develop their own brands.

We are excited about…

• Getting more ambitious things done.
• Taking the long-term view.
• Empowering great entrepreneurs and companies to flourish.
• Investing at the scale of the opportunities and resources we see.
• Improving the transparency and oversight of what we’re doing.
• Making Google even better through greater focus.
• And hopefully...as a result of all this, improving the lives of as many people as we can.

What could be better? No wonder we are excited to get to work with everyone in the Alphabet family. Don’t worry, we’re still getting used to the name too!

Posted by Larry Page, CEO

Disclosure time: I didn't actually read every word of Larry's post. But that doesn't mean you shouldn't. (No, it's not enough to know that he and Sergey are really excited.)

So what does this all mean? Let's go back to Hayley's report.

The move comes as Google struggles to maintain focus as its portfolio grows and its interests spread across various industries. That sprawl has recently attracted criticism from investors, who wondered whether the company could remain innovative with so many distractions.

Page will be chief executive of Alphabet, while Google co-founder Sergey Brin will become president. Sundar Pichai, who is Google's senior vice president of Android, Chrome and Apps, will become Google's chief executive.

Pichai, who has been a Google employee since 2004, has risen steadily through the company’s ranks. The soft-spoken executive has taken on much of the day-to-day duties of running Google during the past couple of years. He joined as a member of the Chrome team and was credited by Page for making the browser fast, simple and secure. He added Android to his portfolio of responsibilities in 2013. Pichai's reputation as a team player has made him popular within the company, and he has lead the company's keynote presentations for more than a year.

As of last October, Pichai has also been in charge of product and engineering responsibilities for Google's Internet businesses, as Page and Brin have turned more attention to side products.

And as you know, assuming you read every word of Larry's post, Larry and Sergey "have been super excited about [Sundar's] progress and dedication to the company," and it's clear to them and to their board "that it is time for Sundar to be CEO of Google." Way to go, Sundar!

As for the other Google boys and girls, Hayley tells us:

Most of the top Google executives will become Alphabet executives, according to a Securities and Exchange Commission filing. Google Executive Chairman Eric Schmidt, Chief Financial Officer Ruth Porat and chief legal officer David Drummond will take up corresponding positions within Alphabet. Porat will also remain the CFO of Google.

A BIT OF HISTORY (HEY, PAY ATTENTION!)

You probably know all this, but can you quote the current cash value of Google? I didn't think so. So just sit still and read this. You're responsible for all of this material on the midterm.

Google, one of the few companies to actually become a verb, hardly needs introduction. The firm was started by Larry Page and Sergey Brin in 1997, after the two met as students at Stanford University. Before Google, the two worked together on a search engine called BackRub, which they operated on the servers at Stanford for more than a year. The pair registered the domain name "Google.com" on Sept. 17, 1998, with the mission to organize all of the world's information.

The company went public in 2004. It is worth $443.9 billion and handles an estimated 67 percent of the country's desktop searches and 83 percent of its mobile searches, according to ComScore. Internationally, NetMarketShare puts Google's global desktop search share at 70 percent.

While the company has always held search at its core, it has expanded into several different areas.

Which kind of brings us back to, you know, that "criticism from investors, who wondered whether the company could remain innovative with so many distractions." (By the way, if you were thinking of slamming $443.9 billion down on the table with a view to buying Google, you should know that, as Hayley reports, "Google shares were up nearly 6 percent in after-hours trading on the news, to about $671 per share." But you know how those kids on Wall Street are -- they often get, you know, a little carried away.)


THIS ISN'T MY CRITICISM OF GOOGLE

You know, all the innovation and all the distractions. And I realize that in the practical and conceptual cosmos that Google bestrides, I'm just a mite of a mote out on the fringe. But I have to use the effing software they bestowed on our bloghost, Blogger, after they acquired it. I guess it was nice that they thought to do an overhaul to make the software better. It's just that they turned the job over to a team of imbeciles who have apparently never used the software, and never plan to. Or possibly to some Googleberry's idiot nephew. And nobody seemed to care that what they -- or he -- produced often functions more like a virus than like software, arbitrarily reaching into the hapless blogger's code and "tweaking" it into unintelligibility. Not to mention reaching into the hapless blogger's computers and festooning them with the software-code equivalent of chewing gum to slow them down and even make them crawl to a screeching halt.

Why just now, as I glanced at the code for this post as it takes shape, I had to go in and extract a bunch of non-breaking spaces that the blog software had unilaterally inserted. Don't get me started on non-breaking spaces, which don't do what Google's Idiot Nephew seems to think they do. And I could offer you a million more like this, but Google doesn't care, so why should you?


WHEW! I WAS FEELING GUILTY, BUT EVER
SINCE GOOGLE MAPS GOT "IMPROVED" --

As for other stuff that Google has either created or acquired: I think Gmail sucks just as bad as, and more flamboyantly than, AOL Mail, for which those of us who still use it are so royally ridiculed; I have no use for Google accounts, let alone Google-Plus, which I can't even figure out what it is; I hate Android, which I also haven't figured out how to use in the nearly four years I've had Android phones (I took an educational session at the public library and came out understanding less than when I went in); and You Tube, despite its undeniable points of interest, seems to me a major blight of our time, in terms of the amount of mental and physical energy wasted on it.

All that said, there was one corner of the Googleverse for which I used to harbor warm feelings, even admiration: Google Maps. To begin with, I'm a map person from way back, and especially for my extensive wanderings about my local area, I came to consider Google Maps a godsend (which no, is not the same thing as a Google-send). My amazement grew as I discovered how effectively, even with my limited technical expertise, I could not just locate places or areas I was looking for but then size and crop wonderfully useful maps on a plain old b&w printer.

So then, naturally, they went and "improved" it. For a while, the software would warn, anytime I accessed it from either of the two computers I principally use, that said computers did not meet the system requirements of the improved software but that I would be allowed to use a specially devised version of the software, a version that was apparently devised for morons, which was basically a shade this side of useless. Now that warning seems to be gone, and I just get the moron version of the software, which is okay on-screen but seems incapable of printing out anything but a moron version of the region of the map you've customized, a moron map that looks like it was created by a three-year-old who was allowed to glance at the original for a few seconds and was then asked to draw the things he/she remembers from it.

I worked out a Rube Goldberg-style work-around for something I was able to do without great difficulty with the unimproved Google Maps software: do a screen grab of the portion of the map I want to print out, then print that file. But I'm confident that the Google Software Commando Team is working on a way to make this impossible.

Of course it's my fault for continuing to use computers that Time Has Passed By, and never mind that they happen to do all the things I need them to do, or they would be able to if the dubiously "improved" generations of software hadn't designed them into obsolescence, and it doesn't matter that I don't need or want to do any of the wonderful new things that the newer hardware and software have been empowered to do.

In this Google is hardly alone. I understand that I'm meant to buy new computers, but in fact one of the two computers I use isn't under my control, and as for the one that is, well, I don't wanna buy a new computer. This one used to be able to do all the things I needed it to do, and it still could if it were allowed to.


SO IT'S NOT JUST GOOGLE THAT SUCKS

But if I were Google (or "Alphabet," or "Horse's Patoot," or whatever they want to call themselves), I don't know that I would consider this something to brag about.

#