“Google’s culture has informally emerged from its founders’ beliefs that a workplace should be loaded with perks and overloaded with intellectual stimulation.”

Working at Google (also: Alphabet) means you get free food, pilates, doctors, massages, and swag. In some ways, it is organized to feel exactly like college, and indeed they recruit people who haven’t done anything else. It has a strong, probably unique culture, and possesses tremendous power in the modern world, both for the information in possesses and the services it provides.

All that sounds nice, and in many ways its culture has led to its strength. It has also led to some blind spots, though. Googlers (Alphabeters?) can sometimes be baffled by the public’s response to their products: for a company based explicitly on doing good, they have managed to alienate a number of their natural allies, including people who believe in freedom of information and transparency. It is in some ways a closed shop, quick to accuse critics of self-interest rather than legitimate concerns, and oblivious to the fact that the massive power it has assembled can be used for evil as well as good. Their behaviour has also not always matched their ideal, as when they first partnered with, then crushed, Mozilla, or when they settled with the publishing industry to not actually make books available to the public, but just to sell them.

In the Plex, with extensive interviews of googlers and studies of google, looks at this issue in the broader context of google’s evolution as a firm. As it continues to expand, it faces the dual challenge of outside critics and how to maintain its culture in an increasingly sprawling empire. The book addresses a lot of important questions, and google’s story is certainly fascinating. In the Plex can sometimes be a bit oblivious, as when it discusses Google using Al Gore to give free gmail accounts (which were at the time selling for about $100 on a secondary market) to politicians who were critics of them, without seeming to realize that verges on bribery. Overall, though, it does a good job looking at the challenges with the triumphs. I’m not sure anyway wants to go back to a world without google, but I think there are a lot of people who would like to see some changes in how data is protected and stored