The Audacity of Hope

every book ever published into a web-accessible format, creating a virtual library that
would store the entirety of human knowledge.
Toward the end of the tour, Larry led me to a room where a three-dimensional image of
the earth rotated on a large flat-panel monitor. Larry asked the young Indian American
engineer who was working nearby to explain what we were looking at.
“These lights represent all the searches that are going on right now,” the engineer said.
“Each color is a different language. If you move the toggle this way”—he caused the
screen to alter—“you can see the traffic patterns of the entire Internet system.”
The image was mesmerizing, more organic than mechanical, as if I were glimpsing the
early stages of some accelerating evolutionary process, in which all the boundaries
between men—nationality, race, religion, wealth—were rendered invisible and
irrelevant, so that the physicist in Cambridge, the bond trader in Tokyo, the student in a
remote Indian village, and the manager of a Mexico City department store were drawn
into a single, constant, thrumming conversation, time and space giving way to a world
spun entirely of light. Then I noticed the broad swaths of darkness as the globe spun on
its axis—most of Africa, chunks of South Asia, even some portions of the United States,
where the thick cords of light dissolved into a few discrete strands.
My reverie was broken by the appearance of Sergey, a compact man perhaps a few
years younger than Larry. He suggested that I go with them to their TGIF assembly, a
tradition that they had maintained since the beginning of the company, when all of
Google’s employees got together over beer and food and discussed whatever they had
on their minds. As we entered a large hall, throngs of young people were already seated,
some drinking and laughing, others still typing into PDAs or laptops, a buzz of
excitement in the air. A group of fifty or so seemed more attentive than the rest, and
David explained that these were the new hires, fresh from graduate school; today was
their induction into the Google team. One by one, the new employees were introduced,
their faces flashing on a big screen alongside information about their degrees, hobbies,
and interests. At least half of the group looked Asian; a large percentage of the whites
had Eastern European names. As far as I could tell, not one was black or Latino. Later,
walking back to my car, I mentioned this to David and he nodded.
“We know it’s a problem,” he said, and mentioned efforts Google was making to
provide scholarships to expand the pool of minority and female math and science
students. In the meantime, Google needed to stay competitive, which meant hiring the
top graduates of the top math, engineering, and computer science programs in the
country—MIT, Caltech, Stanford, Berkeley. You could count on two hands, David told
me, the number of black and Latino kids in those programs.
In fact, according to David, just finding American-born engineers, whatever their race,
was getting harder—which was why every company in Silicon Valley had come to rely
heavily on foreign students. Lately, high-tech employers had a new set of worries: Since
9/11 a lot of foreign students were having second thoughts about studying in the States
due to the difficulties in obtaining visas. Top-notch engineers or software designers
didn’t need to come to Silicon Valley anymore to find work or get financing for a startup.
High-tech firms were setting up operations in India and China at a rapid pace, and
venture funds were now global; they would just as readily invest in Mumbai or