15 KiB
- an open letter.
- external.
- a draft.
- Which you can read in this node in the Agora of Flancia.
- About democracy, freedom, fairness and protopianism in the Commons :)
- Written during May 2025 in the context of node club on digital capitalism -- and the 20th anniversary of the founder's letter
- an open letter.
- [internal]].
- This other version is corp only as I work for Google and I believe it is most ethical to work within the circle of trust that the corporation pays me to uphold when going into a certain level of detail.
- If you work at Google and you would like to read this letter as well, please reach out!
Introduction
I bet you don't run into letters with introductions every day :)
This open letter was written in early May 2024 with the occasion of the 20th anniversary of the April 29th publication of Google's founders letter ahead of its 2004-08-19 IPO. I write this with the pro-social intent of inviting Google the corporation, its employees and the internet at large to a constructive retrospective of the years lived together since Google started engaging with the greater internet community as a public company.
This letter is written with good intentions, with loving kindness towards all beings, following the principle of charity, as an individual with a public internet presence who happens to be an employee of Google as of the time of writing.
This letter contains, or links to, a series of proposals for changes in the company and in the nature of its engagement with people (alternatively "employees" or "users"). These are essentially a series of related well-meaning recommendations and declarations of intents to improve the world according to my views, and as such they are subject to error and other kinds of imperfections.
All errors are my own; please believe that I remain committed to improving through your feedback and personal reflection.
And now, without further ado... :)
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*** Note: as of the time of writing (2024-05-03, 2024-05-07, ...), this letter and all proplshere should be considered most definitely a work in progress. I started writing here on April 29th with the intent to have it in readable state on the first week of May 2024 (depending on how work and personal life go), but I have covered many of these topics before, as fragments, elsewhere in the Agora in the form of nodes; so please refer to those if at all interested, and reach out if you have any questions or comments :). ***
Why I'm writing this letter
I am writing this letter because nobody else seems to be doing it, and I thought someone should.
With the occasion of the founders letter anniversary, a date to me more significant for my relationship with the company than probably any other (including its founding), I was hoping for both the company and the wider internet to take the opportunity to have an open conversation about the general state of affairs as Google the /public company enters the third decade of a mostly deserved reign as internet search engine and provider of knowledge tools in the market. Instead so far I have only seen silence. People seem jaded, as if Google has lost their trust and can now be expected to do no better than other corporations; to act just as other corporations do, despite our founders letter being our public declaration of intentions. The base for which users, and stockholders, decided to trust Google early on.
I sincerely hope both company and wider society can recognize the opportunity to reflect together on the occasion. It seems, to me anyway, very apropos to stop for a moment and consider together how company, internet and market evolved and became entangled together in the last 20 years as we all (Google, Googlers, users and public society including other tech companies) aged -- and learnt, and grew -- and our roles shifted in the wider socioeconomic context.
That's what we are setting out to do, anyway. Join me? :)
I say, in short: an Agora is what Google could be, maybe
The Agora, in short, is what I call my umbrella proposal.
But when I say that "Google" should be more like "an Agora" I mean not the Agora and Google exactly as they are in their current form, but rather in their full potential or entelechy; as per the set of values and intentions most closely aligned with the intent of the founders or stewards of a company or community.
I write this in the context of what some call late stage capitalism and can safely be alternatively described as digital capitalism in mid 2024. I, as a Google employee, am writing to communicate my recommendations as clearly and as harmlessly as possible to both company and society.
My intention is the following: to develop, together, a commons containing a prosocial transparent governance layer for the internet and use it in a daring way to try to advance society and civilization. And I intend to convince Google that this is the right thing for both people ("users") and company; I intend to convince you, reader, that we should do this together.
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This letter contains, in as succinct a way as I could muster, a series of specific proposals to Google and the community of users. Whenever I couldn't expound in full, I try to include links.
With this letter, I want to make the argument that the project I started personally and then developed as an informal 20% since around 2020 (see Agora project), represents a step forward in the right direction as we navigate the mid 20s together. You, dear reader, will be the judge of the merit of these my claims; please remember that I welcome, always, all feedback.
As you read these proposals, please think and report back optionally: if not these proposals, which? This, in a nutshell, is the spirit of the Agora I am proposing and have been trying to build: it is a commons focused on finding rational incremental improvements achievable by its community. Put another way: if you share proposals for the betterment of society, our endeavors together, or any interesting subset of them, an Agora can be defined that will be interested by default.
The Agora and Google as they are currently, and as they could be
An Agora, in short, is a platform and pro-social device that tries to be free, fair and alive for its community (its "users").
Google is a corporation and a community of employees (traditionally "Googlers", assumed to be practicing "Googlyness" :) In this letter, we will comment on how Google was and how Google is, and what Google could be (again?).
Being mostly profit driven as of the time of writing, Google need not be free at all times; but in this letter I make the argument that, given its position of relevance and control at this stage of the evolution of the first known internet, it should try to become increasingly fair ("democratic") within available market-reality-bound possibilities.
Google should experiment again with being more democratic
Most corporations have historically not been democratic at all; governance wise they tend to be (or become) highly hierarchical, in particular as they age and emergent hierarchies solidify and negotiate market pressures. As far as governmental structures go, companies are stuck in the time of kings and feudalism.
Google toyed with a form of anti-hierarchy early in its lifetime, way before I joined in 2012. The story goes that Larry and Sergey thought that they could do away (relatively still few but ever growing) layers of management, and decided that everyone would report directly to one of them -- I think it was Sergey (I will, of course, check). The experiment was cancelled after a few months due to the resulting overload and dysfunction. It seems to me that it makes sense it failed, even that early in the lifecycle of the company. Hierarchies seem to have evolved to reduce coordination overhead and they have strong points which yield demonstrable evolutionary fitness.
My proposal here is that Google should experiment again with some of the concepts and strategies it explored around the time the original founders letter was published, instead of becoming yet another profit-driven not-putting-users-first in digital capitalism. I am not suggesting it should risk immolation by becoming chaotic or straying away from market expectations altogether. Rather that it should dare to be one of the first companies of this 21st century to learn from governance tools that have have demonstrably helped other human groups scale beyond the obvious limits imposed by what -- again, organizationally speaking -- amounts to an early form of monarchy.
I started the Agora because I believe that the answer to the scaling, growing, aging pains that Google (and other tech corporations) went through in the last twenty years is not to double down on hierarchy, cease to put the user first, focus on maximizing profits while bowing down to market and government pressure and becoming informationally-opaque -- as any "traditional company" would do.
Instead I believe the answer is to try to inch closer to what could be called an informed heterarchy, in one of our proposals one yielded by gradually adopting principles of liquid democracy on top of traditional corporate governance. The Agora project came to life as a demo of a proposal for a free, transparent governance layer to facilitate this process and others similar.
Who I am and why I wrote this
I'm a random guy (and nerd) who got lucky, as others I know :) After coming of age in Argentina in the digital context that seems to be becoming known as the golden age of the internet around the turn of the millenium, I studied literature and computer science and joined Google in 2012 believing the founders cared about the health of the internet and the good of society ahead of profits, and showed it through their public actions and their treatment of employees and users.
During the 00s Google used and developed open protocols like XMPP and WebRTC. Google contributed to open source and the internet commons before it was cool. Google proved that companies could treat their employees very well -- clearly better than average! high-percentile-well -- and still make a more than sufficient (i.e. a shitload) of money. Google, what is more, had encoded these values in their founders letter, the public declaration of intents and purposes centered around don't be evil and a great pithy mission: to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful.
Sure, free was not in it -- but then again, Google offered a fair deal; we could pay with our attention. And it had shown that it could make plenty enough money while offering this fair deal.
So why become evil, indeed, if you can be good and get away with it? If you know you can make money while offering better than average, while being generous to users and employees?
Manichean labels like 'good' (googly) or 'evil' (ungoogly) aside, the question is: why do companies degrade over time? Are we condemned to enshittification? The answer, I believe, is relatively straightforward: all systems will tend to degrade with time, as yet a manifestation of entropy; because of the emergent forces within our social systems that tend to consolidate themselves in hierarchies that risk abusing their positions of power; because things tend not to be, or remain, as good as they seem like they can be.
Because of inefficiencies and lack of trust and coordination. Because of Moloch, as some say. If so: it is to help defeat Moloch and improve human-computer systems that I'm writing this, and that I started building the Agora.
Google could be fairer
Google should strive to be fair as it was ca. 2004 and as its employees and users care to define it in 2024 and going forward.
Fairer to all: fairer to employees, fairer to users (a.k.a. people), fairer to society at large and the greater internet ecosystem.
In which ways could Google be fairer? As per the proposals and ideas above and below. Read on for the positions and proposals that I thought fitting to share in public given my employment and what I think is right speech and right livelihood. But some arguments I will expand only in the version of this letter that only Googlers will see.
Google could be freer
By this I mean not that it should become a non-profit but rather that profits should not get in the way of providing good quality services to people at minimum cost. By this I mean alternatively that Google should adequately compensate the users for their attention.
This might surprise you, but I think Google has been able to stay relatively close to this promise that seems very core to its original mission (to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful). Still, we could do better even.
An Agora is my proposal to move forward
The Agora project is the umbrella under which I'm developing a proposal for a platform that improves in some ways on the internet status quo in the fields of knowledge discovery and governance. The Agora is developed as free software and in the open, with the intent of helping solve problems that ail human groups, corporations and commons as they grow, learn and age together.
The Agora, being a commons, contains a minimum viable governance platform: a space for debate and group decision making coupled with individual exploration.
The Agora puts the user first -- at least some users :) It is currently relatively user unfriendly, but this is because it's a work in progress. Even at this early stage, it does put the user first in two key ways.
First of all, it tries to make it easy to explore alternatives. The 'web results' bar that shows up just below the query tries to link out directly to as many useful sites as we can reasonably show to a visiting user. As of the time of writing Google is highlighted because I still believe it is the best search engine in the internet; and Marginalia is highlighted as a good (and distinct/quirkly fun) fully free/independent alternative.
Second of all, it always has the Wikipedia article up top if one is found. Enough said, I believe? :)
Third of all: after that, what we show is exactly what the users have literally written -- meaning both full Agora users (people who sign up to contribute notes) and social media users.
(...) more on what the Agora is and how I posit it is relevant to Googlers and other communities? (...)
Your Google, your Agora, might be better than this
As I said earlier, I started writing this letter because nobody else seemed to have yet done so and I thought it was worth writing, apropos of the news and all things considered. Beyond the relative value of my positions contained here I would love it if it were to prompt others; to prompt people like you to write your own and do better, or just explore complementary ideas and approaches.
If you write an open letter, please share it and I will link it here and elsewhere. You can also comment on this one in the Agora, using hypothes.is or social media, and I will do my best to respond and learn from your feedback.