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:

Conversationalism + 2008: Humor: Response to Andrew Sullivan

(You can read the post I was responding to here)

As one of these newly emerging youth voters, and also am a huge fan of shows like The Daily Show and The Colbert Report, I'd like to expand a little about what you said when you said "The next generation is deadly serious about this country but they also manage to have fun with it. That's the Millennials' real message, it seems to me." It's something a little more serious than fun: it's humor. See, one of the cores of humor is perspective: in order for things like irony or sarcasm to work, the joke implicitly creates perspective towards the truth. If you can remember the terrible rip-snorting fun that was the 2006 Press Correspondent's Dinner with Stephen Colbert, you'll know that it was funny (or really not funny, depending on your perspective) precisely because of the truth that was imbedded in every joke.

I'd like to point out that both Barack Obama and John McCain were frequent guests on the Daily Show (McCain was at one point--and may still be--the most frequent guest of the Daily Show). They both share an ability to laugh at themselves, to poke fun, to show a little bit of perspective. As the campaign marched forward, I was afraid John McCain had lost it completely, but at that dinner recently he showed himself able to. And how did he appear at that dinner? A lot more in touch with the truth than he has been lately. Comedy requires that self-awareness that you and I both look for in a candidate, and it also means a candidate has to give up their self-importance a little in order to make a self-effacing joke. After all, Stephen Colbert's Press Correspondent's dinner was far more effective than if Jon Stewart had done it because Colbert made himself an image of mockery, and then included Bush and others into that mockery. Note that Nancy Pelosi has, on a couple occasions, warned Congressmen not to appear on the Colbert Report lest they get a mocking that they can't recover from.

I want a candidate who'll have a sense of humor. I mean, I wouldn't choose humor over healthcare, but at the same time, the ability to laugh and joke and break the ice, to see oneself clearly and have perspective on the world around us, to be able to burst self-importance and relax the walls a bit--that ability gives me a lot of faith in their ability to pass healthcare. And in this pompous age of ideology, vitriol, and hatred from both parties toward each other, maybe the future of both parties needs to have a lot more humor. Like Reagan deftly joking about his age, Bill Clinton's ability to connect with people (he hasn't seemed very funny lately, though). Even Nixon's memorable "Checkers" joke separated him from a pact of less worthy candidates. I'm not saying Nixon was a great candidate, but if you look at the way that Nixon and Mao were joking around together, you'll see why it was that it took Nixon to go to China.

Of course, in 2008, there is a limit to the sense of humor I'll take. As someone who wanted McCain to be a different candidate than he turned out to be, I feel pretty "punk'd."