Googler Drops in to Baikonur, Kazakhstan. Drops in!
October 13, 2008
Earlier this year, a very wealthy and intelligent person yelled at me. The occasion was my summarizing several scenarios regarding Google and its warming relationship with Russia. Remember, I perceive Google as a new type of company, a supra national entity that is tough to regulate. Most people are happy seeing Google as a big Web search company that sells far too many ads than it should. Everyone understands ads; everyone understands Web search; therefore, everyone understands Google. I don’t agree with this “logic” but I’m an addled goose.
I do my rundown of scenarios, which I get paid to do for people silly enough to hire me. Now I had a heart event in February 2007. When the wealthy and intelligent person shouted that my comments about Google’s rapprochement with Google, still under the “invisible hand” of Vladimir Putin, former KGB officer and until recently president of Russia, I thought I was heading for the Great Beyond.
The wealthy and intelligent person, based on what I could figure out from his apoplectic tirade directed at me and my analyses was that no person forced to flee from Russia would ever go back. No person whose family had been ill treated by the Russian state would ever deal with the country again. There were other memes and nuggets in this verbal, machine gun fusillade, but I can’t recall them. Intelligence and money can combine to cause a “failure to communicate” I learned.
This morning I read the Washington Post story here by Maria Golovnina “Google Founder Brin Visits Russian Space Cosmodrome” here, I thought about the wealthy and intelligent person’s response to my discussion of rapprochement scenarios. Ms. Golovnina does a very good job of summarizing the “surprise” visit to Baikonur’s cosmodrome. I’m not sure the phrase “surprise visit” captures the hoops one must go through to visit certain areas in Russia. But she likes the word surprise, so I guess we have to assume Mr. Brin just dropped in to the base in the middle of that tourist haven Kazakhstan. “Dropping in” is hard for me to grasp based on my visits to Mother Russia. She also reminds us that Mr. Brin paid $5 million as a deposit to ride into space. The Space Adventures travel agency took the money, and I suppose handled the paperwork which had to be approved by someone in the Russian government.
Also, Google has an office in Moscow, and my recollection is that the company has been hiring people, if my source at Moscow State University knows what he is talking about. Another source suggested that the office, the space ride, the visit to central Kazakhstan indicates that some people in the Russian government want to keep the lines of communication open with Google.
Alleged Moscow Google employees playing Wii golf to ease the tension of processing the world’s information. Source: http://www.flickr.com/photos/alexminza/438520348/in/photostream/
Why is this important to me in rural Kentucky?
In a distributed, massively parallel computing infrastructure, it is possible to concentrate certain processes in certain data centers. I keep thinking that it would be difficult to monitor, regulate, tax, and execute oversight if some computer processes were running on a honking big data center in a nation state such as Russia or some other country friendly to Google but too eager to cooperate with authorities in other nation states. Taxes come to mind as one possible benefit.
My remarks to the wealthy and intelligent person were greeted with outright rejection of the rapprochement between Google and Russia. I don’t know what will result from this space trip, the training, the visits with the folks from the travel agency, and others who happen to be in Kazakhstan when Mr. Brin is there.
Who knows? Maybe the Russian authorities will leave Mr. Brin without an exit option from the comfortable air strip at Baikonur.
In my opinion there may be some value in considering different scenarios, digging for information, and assigning probabilities to certain eventualities. This is a thought game, not the “real world” of wealthy American executives.
In my view, it’s not helpful to reject thinking about what this type of cultural exchange might stimulate. Shouting at me for thinking about the upside and the downside of Mr. Brin’s Russian reveals more about the shouter than the shoutee. My hunch is that money can buy a lot of things, but I am starting to believe that you can buy mental agility.
Stephen Arnold, October 13, 2008
Comments
-
- Subscribe to Beyond Search
Feature archive
News archive
-
