Google, Burning Man and the Bohemian Factory

Fred Turner gave a talk today where he proposed a way to look at Burning Man as a cultural infrastructure of Google. That's a pretty big statement and he presented a very interesting, sophisticated analysis of this claim. Burning Man is a huge cultural and ideological institution in the Bay Area where Google is situated and the technical community comprises a large proportion of annual participants. Burning Man, for all intents and purposes is a techno-art festival, focused on maintaining a culture of creativity, acceptance, self-expression and gift giving. The basic idea is that participants generally attend in groups that project-oriented for making art and community simultaneously.

Google's founders and at the very least the engineering contingent of its employees heavily participate in Burning Man every year. In 1999 the founders famously shut down the company for a week during Burning Man.

Turner's argument is that the founders and the management of Google spend a lot of effort creating and maintaining and environment in the company that supports some of the ideological underpinnings of burning man. What's more, the festival itself serves as a site of cultural production of ideology for Google. But there is more. Turner also argues that Google has managed to harness the Burning Man community for development and production of new media. Burning Man then, becomes a bohemian factory for Google. The idea here is that the gift giving at Burning Man can turn into product development for Google. In practical terms this can manifest in burners creating things that Google can then deploy as part of its suite of products. That development is, of course, done for free in the spirit of gift giving of Burning Man.

Turner uses Marx and Durkheim's ideas of base and superstructure (or organic solidarity vs. machinistic exchange if you will). His main argument is that unique affordances of IT have facilitated a new relationship between culture and industry. where before a "base" generated a "superstructure", now we see cultural "superstructures" becoming a form of an industrial "base" This transformation is facilitated by digital networks but NOT driven by them. This last one is an important point - technology doesn't drive cultural changes, it merely grafts itself onto cultural forms.

This sounds interesting and certainly provocative but I don't buy it for one specific reason: Turner does not address that there is something specific about Google's ability to harness this "bohemian factory" to its ends. There are two IT companies that have managed to become flagship symbols of counter-culture - Google and Apple. Apple, however, doesn't figure in Turner's narrative and its' recent history with upset customers suggests its Bohemian Factory hasn't been working all that well. So why Google?

I think the one thing that was missing from Turner's analysis, is the interesting nature of Google's forms of capitalization and its business model. What Google might call its "product suite" most of us, unwashed masses, call "a service" that is FREE. There are very few Google offerings that require subscription of any kind and even then, as is in case of Google Earth, the majority of the functionality is free. Most of us, users, do not actually observe the process through which Google makes money. So if Google were to introduce a new service, it has the ability to reach the largest number of people quicker than anyone else, providing huge numbers of users for a new free doo-dad. The "FREE" aspect of things fits with the Burning Man ethos of gifting and the pleasure of making things for people's enjoyment. The Bohemian Factory works for Google because it can not see how what it creates becomes a product that generates income. This opaque nature of Google's business practices is the result of unique affordances of IT and the world in which we currently live. As long as there are no immediate physical signs of money changing hands (and adsense is too minor to really pay attention to) the Bohemian Factory will create products for free for a major corporation and not think twice about it.