The Lost Google Novel That Takes a Better Look at Tech Culture Than The Circle</em>

With The Circle, novelist Dave Eggers added his voice to a growing contingent of intellectuals worried and disgusted at a Silicon Valley ethic that — in their view — enriches nerds by enlisting customers as unpaid workers in a user-content, surveillance-friendly economy. Eggers has said that he didn’t base his diabolical corporation, The Circle, on Google or Facebook, and that he has done little direct research. But clearly the company’s culture is based on what Eggers, a Bay Area resident, has absorbed about those companies. Part of the book’s credibility comes in constructing a viable facsimile of what you’d find on those campuses.

He does a good job on that front, so much that the book reminded me of one of the most detailed and entertaining accounts of life at Google, a 2005 novel called Virtual Love written by a then-Google executive named Kim Malone Scott. I assume that Eggers never heard of Scott’s book, mainly because it was never released. (Eggers has already had to fend off one charge of plagiarism by a woman who wrote about her experiences at Facebook.) After a few rejections, Scott stashed it on her hard drive, partly relieved that she didn’t have to deal with the complications of publishing a novel about her peers.

I heard about Virtual Love while researching In the Plex, my non-fiction book about Google, and sought her permission to read it and quote from it. Since her book is an unabashed roman á clef, it provided a great window into Google’s culture. (When I drew the information from the book, I had to work with her to delineate which details hewed to bedrock reality and which were fictionalized.)

Unlike Eggers, Scott has no huge critical points to make about the dangers of social networking or surveillance. Her book is definitely one of the heart, a first-person account of a young woman seeking connection in a real-life high-tech fantasyland. At first glance, the two books are almost doppelgängers.

The similarities begin with the protagonists. Egger’s Mae Holland comes to The Circle because of her close friendship with one of the company’s top executives, Annie. Likewise, the heroine of Virtual Love is Virginia Libert, whose long-time friend Sarah is one of Google’s key executives. (In real life, Malone was brought to Google by a business school buddy, Sheryl Sandberg.)

Both books portray immersively connected companies, using snippets of email and online chat to move the plot. In both, the newbies are stunned at the friendliness of the workplace and the bountiful freebies provided to employees. Both have encounters with the company doctor. Both find escape in outdoor activities off campus. Both have to negotiate romantic relationships with fellow workers. And in both cases, there are intimations (though in Scott’s case purely fanciful) of Founder Sex.

As the books progress, they become less similar. Eggers is writing a scary parable in which paints The Circle as villainous beyond what even the harshest critics of Google and Facebook would allege, while Scott’s barbs come in the form of gentle eye-rolling at the current looniness of the real Silicon Valley. Nonetheless, there is an unmistakable kinship between these two works, most of all in the remarkably similar starry-eyed approach of their heroines. Mae and Virginia are both capable and ambitious young women who are bowled over by their employer’s indulgences. But while Eggers’ character rises in the company because of contrived circumstances, Scott’s character actually uses intelligence and management skills to get things done.

In Scott’s book, you get far more of the actual texture of a real-life company. And she doesn’t duck behind a fictional name for her firm. Virginia Libert might be an imagined character but she works for Google. Scott even puts Virginia on the same team she led in real life — AdSense — where she becomes the “Priestess of the Long Tail.”

Scott left Google in 2009, and has since worked stints at Apple and Dropbox. She’s currently consulting at Twitter. Now, spurred by Egger’s work, she has dusted off her book, revising it and self-publishing on Amazon and iBooks. (Here’s the Kindle link, and iBooks is coming next.) It might owe more to Jane Austen than George Orwell, but I consider Virtual Love an essential piece of Google literature.

Source: http://feeds.wired.com/c/35185/f/661370/s/329745c0/sc/4/l/0L0Swired0N0Cunderwire0C20A130C10A0Cvirtual0Elove0Egoogle0Enovel0C/story01.htm
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