The Pens Were Somewhere You Had to Steal Yourself

Somewhere early in the evening someone handed around bananas, and I want to be clear that this was done with a level of ambient eroticism that nobody acknowledged and nobody explained. Google had invited us—me, Daniel, Peter, Paulchen—to their offices for an evening nobody had fully described in advance, and somewhere between the Halloween brain canapés and the fermented vegetable juice, a very polished person told us how easy it is to make money on YouTube. Protip: make good videos. Someone else demonstrated how you can shout at your phone and it will tell you where the nearest pizza place is. In bad English. But still.

I spent part of the night inside some kind of magic box flying through a pixelated version of Tokyo. Probably the best part. Daniel applauded things. Peter groaned. Paulchen swallowed. I got a small speaker and a notepad with no pen—the pens, apparently, were in a place where you had to steal them yourself.

Nobody wanted to talk about GEMA, the NSA, or the press officer Stefan Keuchel’s peculiar screen presence. That was fine. The brain was good because it was Halloween. The vegetable juices were interesting. And if you ever get genuinely tired of Facebook—not dramatically tired, just done—Google+ was right there waiting, a digital living room with better lighting and nobody you actually know in it. Internet and so on.