Personality and Corporatism

Okay, two points along the theme of personality and corporatism:

GOOGLE

If you go to Youtube right now and look up any video (I suggest Diego Maradona's goal of the century), you'll see a little soccer ball icon next to the volume control (sadly unavailable on embedded videos). If you click it, it turns on the vuvuzelas.

Needless to say, this is funny.

What it indicates, though, is that someone at Google's Youtube division went up to their boss and said, "Hey wouldn't it be funny if we put a little button that put on the sound of vuvuzelas?" And their boss said, "Yes."

Obviously, this is a product of their much-lauded "twenty percent time." But separate to that, it indicates that Google is a company which values humor. Don't get me wrong, this isn't a love note to Google -- Google is a large enough company to encapsulate both the best and worst of everything -- but this is one aspect that seems ancillary, but is actually a big part of their success. After all, I think one of Google's greatest successes aren't the big things they do ("hey look at us we're going to revolutionize communication with Google Wave... no? anyone?"), but rather the small usability things they incorporate.

For instance, I laughed incredibly hard after I noticed that Google Labs has a little widget that checks your outgoing email for the word "Attached" or "Attachment," and if you use that word but don't attach anything, it says, "It looks like you forgot to attach something..." It's like an actually helpful version of Clippy, minus the annoying avatar. And I can bet you 100% that this feature started as a joke, because before someone did it it seemed like a joke.

I say this because at the company where I work at, there's the same sort of sense of humor. Back when it was a small company, the humor got expressed in the product -- the word "Cubulator" was used, for instance, as was the name "Shazzam" and a few meaningless acronyms.

But as the company has grown, we work with a lot of big, heavy-hitting clients now. And they have very little senses of humor when it comes to the product. This is not to say that the individuals we work with don't have a sense of humor, they're great guys -- it's just that humor in a product gives them the impression that the product is un-serious. They don't want an un-serious product made by a company that doesn't take their concerns seriously.

It comes up a lot in terms of process maturity. We do things loosely, because we're a small company that doesn't need a lot of formal processes the way that a multibillion dollar multinational might need to. But they have requirements that people they work with conform to certain processes. So slowly, over time, they try to remake the companies they work with or contract from in their own image.

And thus, programmers wind up keeping their humor to themselves, because they're focusing on delivering a serious product. I'm glad that Google continues to fight for the right of humor to remain not just part of employee culture but part of the public face of the company.

KAGAN

Which brings me to Elana Kagan, just to say that I find her to be a very corporate person -- she's really, really gone out of her way not to leave a paper trail of any wild opinions or anything. So I was expecting a cold, ironclad stance towards questioning. Instead, she went with humor a number of times:

Our Sex Lives

Matthew Yglesias has this to say about Elana Kagan, and the firestorm surrounding her:

This strikes me as part of a broader set of questions where I tend to see older straight liberals seeing things one way and gays and younger straight liberals seeing it differently.

When you think about it, the whole reason these “it’s none of your business” situations arise is precisely because facts about your sexual orientation aren’t considered on a par with questions about one’s sex life. Straight people don’t normally discuss our sex lives with casual acquaintances or unknown readers, but we’re expected to over time bring dates to events or make passing reference to current or former partners. It’s when someone doesn’t do that stuff that people begin to wonder if the person is gay.

Oh my god.

I didn't realize...

Faithful readers, I'm looking back in my archives and, well, I don't see any passing references to current or former partners. I haven't been talking about current or former partners in passing with any except my closest friends... I haven't been seen in public lately with a date. I didn't have a date in the audience of any of my most recent shows...

I'm thinking about it, and, well, normally I'd keep this sort of personal information to myself -- I've never denied it, but I haven't been open with this aspect of my life before. I'm not necessarily sure people in my community would approve, actually. But I think it's important for me to come clean, and tell you about something which I thought effects only me, but may actually be a strong part of my identity and influence how I look at the world.

I...

I'm a virgin.

Yes, that's right. There are no current or former partners for me to discuss, and I haven't had any dates lately. I try to keep this to myself because I didn't feel it was relevant to my work as a public figure, but reading Yglesias' post, I realize that my quiet on the subject may have led you all to speculate that I am gay.

I am not gay.

Not that there's anything wrong with that.

Anyways, sarcasm aside, as one of the small community of people who have retained their virginity past graduating from college, as well as being one of the few who do not drink, and from my unique vantage point of puritanism, I've noticed that what Yglesias is saying about the assumptions people make when you don't participate in the conversation.

Living amongst the college aged, believe you me I've seen entire conversations -- of upwards of an hour -- of people just talking about drinking exploits. Hell, some people make careers of it. Conversations that I am, by definition, excluded from. (I usually break in at some point to say, "And this one time, I had a cup of chamomile that had me slightly peppy for like twenty minutes!")

And that's what people talk about when they mean "peer pressure." Not "HEY YOU SHOULD DRINK THAT BEER" (although I've seen one or two examples of that), but just a culture in which people are expected to have some fun stories about sex or drinking stupidities to prove that they've "been there" and "done that."

If you don't, apparently it is completely fair to wonder about their identity. In Yglesias' context, it is wondering whether they are a closet case, but it applies equally to wondering if they're other things as well. That's the acidic effect of making assumptions.

Court Commentary: Biden on Kagan

So, Joe Biden wants me to back Elana Kagan. In his note he says:

To see why, look no further than her role in the Citizens United case. It was a legal battle that most experts agreed would be impossible for the government to win. But as Solicitor General, Elena chose this as her first case. She recognized that rolling back bipartisan election law would allow special interests to dominate campaigns across the country and drown out the voice of the American people. Though she knew she'd probably lose, she chose to make it her fight all the same. That's character.

Wait, hold on a moment -- who thought Kagan was going to lose Citizens United? Since when was that case a foregone conclusion? And how does that obviate her responsibility in losing one of the landmark cases of the last year?

I don't think Obama and Biden want to make a big case of Kagan's positions as a Solicitor General. Let's take one at random: here's a recap of a case where Kagan argued that detainees at Bagram Airbase have no rights:

The U.S. Supreme Court ruling in Boumediene v Bush, which granted habeas rights to Guantanamo detainees, Kagan wrote, “rested heavily on the ‘unique status of Guantanamo’” in terms of “the nature and duration of the United States presence at the site of detention, and the practical obstacles to permitting the detainee to pursue habeas relief in United States court…”

Bagram, she wrote, “does not share the defining attributes of Guantanamo,” thus “an enemy alien apprehended and detained by the military overseas in an active war zone at the very least bears an extremely heavy burden before he may sue his captors civilly and require the federal courts to second guess the judgment of both political branches with respect to the reach of habeas jurisdiction.”

Now, whether or not the case is correctly legally argued, it returns to mind the fact that the Solicitor General's job is to basically legally argue whatever the President believes, whether it be that Bagram air-base detainees have no rights or that some detainees may be held forever.

How strange, then, to back a Solicitor General for losing a case of great importance, while defending a principle that you told her to have.