Eric Schmidt goofed.
It wasn’t a massive, loud goof. It’s not as if he dropped custard into the cleavage of the wife of the Russian Prime Minister or sat on a Saudi Prince’s priceless and beloved cat. But he goofed, all the same, in a very significant way.
He said it was Google’s policy “to get right up to the creepy line and not cross it”.
A lot of people have talked about this, and mostly their worries centre on where the Creepy Line is and whether Google has crossed it. Since Mr Schmidt routinely says things like “We don’t need you to type at all. We know where you are. We know where you’ve been. We can more or less know what you’re thinking about”, which is creepy as hell as far as I’m concerned, that debate is pretty much uninteresting to me. Plus also, while I love Google for some of the things they’ve done, I don’t much fancy the ASA/Google Book Settlement. In fact, I think it’s a nightmare of compulsory licensing and private lawmaking. I think their attitude to (other people’s) IP and their attitude to privacy are of a piece, a kind of wonky, unexamined Ultra-Free Market Collectivism.
All that aside, what I find revealing about Mr Schmidt’s comment is this: it’s the perfect statement of conventional corporate culture. It’s not “Don’t Be Evil” at all. It’s “Get absolutely as close to Evil as you can without having to acknowledge that you’re evil.” And here’s the thing about Evil: it is diffuse. It is nebulous. The trick with avoiding Evil is that you don’t want to be near it, because it will slosh over the side of the Evil Bathtub and get Evil Foamy Suds on your shoes. If you want not to be Evil – as you can see pretty clearly if you read the coverage of the Iraq War Logs released recently by Wikileaks – you have to create a buffer zone between you and anything which even looks as if it could possibly be Evil. You have to say: “okay, that, over there, that is Evil, and we are going to avoid it! We will allow nothing of it to contaminate us! In fact, we will arrange our organisation in such a way that contact with us weakens and vanquishes it! Boooooo to Evil!”
That isn’t Mr Schmidt’s line at all. Evil works, so while he doesn’t want to be actually Evil, he’s apparently happy to nuzzle up against Evil (or as he puts it, ‘creepy’) and learn from it. Don’t get me wrong: I’m not saying he’s a bad guy. He’s not. That’s the sucky thing about Evil. It works on good people too.
It’s not Come To The Dark Side. In this context, the Dark Side will happily come to you.
