Brain at Google

Google invited some of us over yesterday to show us stuff. I’m still not sure why—maybe they thought we needed convincing—but there we were, eating Halloween brain and drinking some kind of vegetable juice while someone from their team explained YouTube monetization and voice search. As if we didn’t already know the basics.

Part of the evening I spent flying through a pixelated Tokyo on a virtual tour, or a demo, or something. I’m genuinely not sure what it was supposed to be. I ate actual brain—because Halloween—drank beer, drank more of the vegetable juice, and on the way out they handed me a little speaker and a notebook. No pen. You had to steal one.

Daniel was clapping at some point. Peter kept making sounds. Paulchen was working his way through the food spread. The whole thing had that strange energy of a tech press event—people in casual poses explaining why their new thing is going to change everything—while you’re standing in the middle of Germany eating meat and drinking juice and trying not to think about whether any of this actually matters.

They wanted to pitch Google+ to us, like it was the next big thing, like we’d all eventually get tired of Facebook and migrate over. Better privacy controls, supposedly. More community-focused. I came home with the speaker and forgot about it pretty quickly. Never opened a Google+ account. Probably never will.