Grit in the Google machine: why technology needs the friction of politics

A visit to the Googleplex offers a reminder of the need for public debate about the ethical, social and environmental implications of new technologies.

At the headquarters of Google in Mountain View, California, multi-coloured bikes are scattered around the campus; there's a Holodeck (a dizzying immersive version of Google Earth); and two of the meeting rooms are called Flux and Capacitor. So far, so Google.

Yet the company, which earns most of its revenues through advertising, has a strange urge to communicate its materiality. The campus features a visitor centre, still 'in beta', which has the difficult task of assembling objects to depict the history of a corporation that deals in bits rather than atoms. These include a graph tracking Google searches over time, a nap pod and a reconstruction of a Google office, which looks like" an office. Weirder still is the sculpture garden, a patch of grass occupied by several large Android statues, one for each version of the operating system.