|
|
|
the drunken streets of Venice
Thursday, February 15 2018
location: Norton Avenue, West Hollywood, California
I awoke a little after 5:00am local time not knowing quite where I was.
[REDACTED]I took a nice hot shower and then walked to work, stopping at Whole Foods along the way to get a big cup of coffee (hey, I'm sort of on vacation) and a tray of tofu spring rolls (the perfect breakfast). [REDACTED]
At about 11:30am, I ordered up an Uber Pool to the Google campus in Venice. There would be a presentation there today on the subject of Google Cloud Platform which (as part of my day job), I had agreed to get on an airplane to attend. My work-related needs were very specific[REDACTED]. My Uber was driven by Ana, a Latina who had placed an tablet computer over her car's usual readouts (including the speedometer), and that was how she navigated. She also had a subsidiary smartphone mounted horizontally on the dashboard where it continually played some sort of Spanish-language program that consisted mostly of music. Ana offered me snacks from a bowl on the floor, none of which interested me, though the cacahuates peanuts were vegan.
The driver almost had an accident in Venice when I realized I'd just given her the wrong destination address (which she shouldn't've needed, but she said one of her devices needed a charge, which makes little sense given her car is one big gas-powered charger). By now, though, we were chummy enough for me to be telling her that I was going to a conference, that I'd never been to the venue before, and that all I knew for sure was that there would be free food and booze. At the end of the ride, Ana insisted I take from her freebie basket. So I reluctantly snatched a bag of cacahuates peanuts but turned down the off-brand softdrink. As I climbed out of the car in front of Gold's Gym, there was my colleague Zi, the only other person from my workplace who would be there. We were a hundred feet or so from the entrance to Google's Venice campus, and when we came to the blue-shirted security guy, I tried showing him the crude printout I'd made of the result of Google's surprisingly-ghetto registration process (in Google Chrome, the labels for the form items vanished after the registration page had loaded, so I'd had to use the browser's inspect element to know what to enter!). But that wasn't enough. We also had to say what we were there for. The magic words were "Google Cloud Platform." This gained us access to the campus and to a desk in front of the venue, and there we received our nametags and a bag of schwag. The bag contained precisely one thing: a Google Home Mini, an internet-connected personal assistant with a voice-only interface. The sign-in woman, on seeing the organization I represent, said she was a fan already.
In the venue, a largish metal building with a stage lit up in a Google rainbow, Zi and I chatted while the others came in and took their seats. It was an overwhelmingly male audience, with maybe three hundred men and three or four women. [REDACTED] The men were older and whiter than I'd been expecting. My age (tomorrow I would turning 50) was about average in the room, and there was a surprising lack of Indians or East Asians. There were a few black guys, and they were dressed better than everyone else.
As for the presentation itself, it proved to be much more general than I'd been led to believe. Its emphasis was on security, which is understandable given the reluctance people have to entrust their private matters to an entity reachable only across the internet. The first speaker stressed the existence of their own fibre optic network, featuring their own undersea cables. A global map of their own private internet looked pretty well filled-out, with server farms at all the major cities and fibre cables almost circling the world (though those coming from east did not link up with those from the west at a noticeable gap in India). The speaker also spoke of "defense at depth," meaning that just because someone had found his way into Google's internal network does not mean he is assumed to be legit.
There were a series of other speakers, but none of them touched on the issue that Zi and I had come to learn about. I incidentally learned about subject matters that actually pertain better to my day-to-day work, such as about SQL-queriable databases that infinitely scale across the globe. But at some point Zi looked at me and said "we should just go." I suggested we stay for the happy hour and try to buttonhole someone instead. So that was what we decided to do.
[REDACTED] but the metal walls of venue acted as a faraday cage, and by the time I got notice of it, it came all at once is a flurry of panicking red icons in Slack.
[REDACTED]
The conference room drained out into a festive outdoor area featuring finger food and free adult beverages. Zi and I managed to discuss our particular needs with a guy we managed to buttonhole, and with that out of the way, we could relax with glasses of wine and what little we could find of the finger food that was vegan. The asparagus was amazingly bad; the best thing they had was grapeleaves ("Greek sushi"), which are on my list of foods that people go apeshit about for reasons that mystify me. [REDACTED] Zi is Chilean, so I felt it important to mention hysterias that have swept American culture in the past, such as the one about ritual satanic abuse in daycare centers back in the 1980s, a scandal that was as devoid of actual offenses as 17th Century witch hysteria in Salem, Massachusetts. She actually knew about the satanic ritual abuse scare. Both of us agreed that, unlike in those past cases, there was likely a lot of substance to the ongoing #MeToo moral readjustment underway.
Regarding Google, I made an observation that has snuck up on me over the years: I think of Google as transhuman. This means that I think of Google as doing things and making decisions beyond the capabilities of what ordinary humans would be able to do. Why is this? Because of their expertise at machine learning and their ability to process a huge fraction of live human communication. This makes their human-machine interfaces the best in the world, and it makes the insights of their algorithms better than anyone else's. I think of them as already being post-singularity while the sad dolts of Microsoft drag behind, trying to keep us buying licenses for Office 365.
Zi's inlaws and husband picked her up outside the Google campus, leaving me at the event with hundreds of increasingly-intoxicated tech bros. I'm not much of a social butterfly, but it would've been a wasted opportunity not to chat with some of these people. So I struck up a conversation at the bar and had soon insinuated myself with a tech bro. He and his other bros would all be dining at a place called The Tasting Kitchen on Abbot Kinney, so he offered me a ride. I'd made it clear that I was vegan, but when we sat down at our upstairs table, waitress was having trouble coming up with stuff for me. So I mainly ate bread dipped in olive oil and drank glasses of what was probably very expensive wine. [REDACTED]
These tech bros weren't really my scene, so at some point I slapped a 20 down on the table and left, carrying my computer bag with its Google Home Mini inside it. I stumbled into some random party on the street and the bartender made me a free drink. Further down the street, I walked into a bar and ordered a beer. The bouncer checked my ID and noted that tomorrow would be my birthday.
Eventually it was time to pull the ripcord on the evening, so I ordered up an Uber Pool (for some reason this wasn't easy, and I did some walking to find a spot where Uber actually was willing to send someone, not that there's any part of Venice left that is particularly sketchy).
When my ride finally came, there were a couple people in the back, so I took the shotgun seat. From the start, a beautiful young woman in the back was acting a little outside the norms of an Uber Pool, accusing me of being gay as her hands came from behind to caress my chest and shoulders. I agreed that I was super gay and being gay was my favorite thing in the whole world (and other things I could think of along this line.) She soon made it clear that she was a stripper on her way to her stripping job. She was so engaged with me that I spent much of the ride turned around talking to her. She asked me what I did and I said I was a web developer. "I wanna be a web developer!" she proclaimed. Though she couldn't keep her hands off me, there was a chaste quality to her personal space violations, which made sense given that they'd been honed in the world of strip clubs. She was, of course, a professional toucher of men, but one has to be careful when one touches a man, particularly a stranger in an Uber Pool.
[REDACTED]
A drawing of a rooster I made on the whiteboard near my desk this morning.
For linking purposes this article's URL is:
http://asecular.com/blog.php?180215 feedback
previous | next |
