Google *Hearts* Burning Man

Excerpt from Bloomberg's "Game Changers" series about Google. Burning Man reference at the 2:01 mark. 

The documentary first aired 28 October 2010.

Eric Schmidt @ Burning Man
2007 (via Gawker)

Yesterday it was announced that Google's CEO Eric Schmidt was stepping down from his position within the company. What this has to do with Burning Man per se is absolutely nothing. Except that this blog is dedicated to the art, culture and community (drink!) of Burning Man. To that end, Schmidt and Google founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page are burners with both Page and Brin in attendance at the festival almost as long as they've been running their company.

The story goes that Schmidt got the job at Google because he was the only candidate for the position that had been to the event according to Silicon Valley journalists John Markoff and Gregg Zachary.

In 2003 Business Week reported that after Schmidt landed the job "one of the first orders of business was joining his new 20-something colleagues at Burning Man.... Sitting in his office shortly after his return, tanned and slightly weary, Eric Schmidt couldn't have been happier. "They're keeping me young," he declared."

There's an entire chapter devoted to Burning Man in the national bestseller book published in 2005 about Google: "The Google Story" by David Vise, a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter for the Washington Post in which the author describes Burning Man as a "counterculture" commune event of about 18,000 people held yearly in a "desolate stretch of Nevada's Black Rock Desert" that attracts "a motley assortment of other technologists, artists, anarchists, intellectuals and free spirits" and where "nudity and drugs mingled easily," "buying and selling were forbidden" and "advertising is banned." That's not to say you couldn't buy "burning man" as a Google AdWord though. We're just sayin'.

The first "Google Doodle" circa 1998

Google loves Burning Man so much that in 1998 the Google logo on the website's landing page was altered during the week of the event to include an image of the Man to one of the "o's" in Google. This was the first of what would come to be known as a "Google doodle". The intent was to send a comical message to Google users that the founders were “out of the office.”

In his paper entitled "Burning Man at Google: a Cultural Infrastructure for New Media Production" Fred Turner, Associate Professor and the Director of Undergraduate Studies in the Department of Communication at Stanford University, believes that elements of the Burning Man — including the building of a sociotechnical commons, participation in project-based artistic labor and the fusion of social and professional interaction — helped to shape and legitimate the collaborative manufacturing processes driving the growth of Google.

While there now may be a job opening at Google the CEO position has already been filled by Larry Page. But if you're thinking it might be kinda cool to work there, according to Future Boy, a one-time guest on the BURNcast podcast, you not only need a "degree from a top-notch university and a stratospheric GPA. But Page and Brin also have a preference for hiring Burning Man attendees...."

BTW, we're told that Google enjoys camping within a stone's throw of First Camp, the playa compound of the Black Rock City LLC's senior staff. If you're in the neighborhood, stop by and say "hi".