Evgeny Morozov takes on the company's corporate motto ("Don’t Be Evil") and examines the technocratic conscience within:
Google’s two founders appear to firmly believe in their own exceptionalism. They are bold enough to think that the laws of sociology and organizational theory—for example, that most institutions, no matter how creative, are likely to end up in the “iron cage” of highly rationalized bureaucracy—do not apply to Google. This belief runs so deep that for a while they tried to run the company without middle managers—with disastrous results.
Google’s embarrassing bouts of corporate autism—those increasingly frequent moments when the company is revealed to be out of touch with the outside world—stem precisely from this odd refusal to acknowledge its own normality. Time and again, its engineers fail to anticipate the loud public outcry over the privacy flaws in its products, not because they lack the technical knowledge to patch the related problems but because they have a hard time imagining an outside world where Google is seen as just another greedy corporation that might have incentives to behave unethically…
A former employee – the 59th – recounts tbe company’s early days.
The Dish 