The Google Generation
November 6, 2008
Barack Obama and I are the same age, and both of us graduated from top law schools. The similarity ends there. He is a gifted political orator, I am not. He is about to take puppy and kids to the White House. I remain in the ivory tower.
Obama was elected President by a wide array of voters young and old. Latinos, men and women, Democrats and independents, Jews, Christians, and African Americans turned out in record numbers to turn out the Republicans. Still, I am especially heartened by the fact that Obama won by 10 points among college-educated white voters, and I think that was no accident.
In places like Virginia and Colorado, young, educated members of the professional class are flooding into the suburbs and exurbs. This “Google Generation” of knowledge workers makes its living with a computer and smartphone. They are not beholden to any political party or ideology, and that has led some think of them as apolitical. But so many of them participated in this movement that this simply is no longer true. Is it any wonder that Google’s CEO starred in the Obama infomercial? Yeah, thought not.
In Barack Obama, this generation saw one of their own, who inspired him with his rhetoric but also spoke their language and adopted methods of reaching them that were exquisitely tailored to them: Facebook, e-mail, and so on. On Election Day alone I received half a dozen e-mail messages and several videos imploring me to vote. On the eve of the election, we roared over the viral video that “blamed” a single voter for not turning out to support Obama. You shared it with your friends, and then by inserting their e-mail addresses, it was their turn to cringe and laugh. It was a technological marvel with high production values, and apparently very effective, as 12 million people shared the “blame.”
Among them is the first person to alert me to the candidacy of the senator from Illinois with the funny name. Rick Klau is a graduate of our law school who forsook law practice for the techie world, which surprised no one who was paying attention when he was the driving force behind the creation at Richmond of the nation’s first online law journal devoted to technology issues.
Rick deserves credit for introducing me to Twitter, Talkingpointsmemo, the finer points of RSS (his company Feedburner is now part of the Google world), iGoogle, and, most importantly, the Obama campaign and its vast presence on the Internet. Not a bad list, no? He was on board the Obama train and cheering long before anyone else I know. Heck, he’d had the guy in his living room (he now proudly says he’s 1 for 1 with candidates with that status). And he convinced me, singlehandedly, to get on board with Obama, whom I had only known previously from his electrifying speech in 2004.
The nation has handed over the car keys to someone my age. Not to baby boomers still reliving Vietnam, not to the Democrats’ traditional constituencies, but to this new creative class, the Google Generation. How often were the words “disciplined” and “professional” used to describe Obama’s great campaign, the one whose methods will be studied in political science classes for decades to come? That is the ethos of this cohort, and the real break from the past that Obama represents. It’s time for the group that created Google and Facebook to turn that creativity to make headway in the federal government, which is sorely in need of change.
In this new era, government has a continuing and important role to play. While the Google Generation has not been part of the traditional framework of government-building, and it may not have the expected views about government’s purpose, its perspective is not a libertarian disbelief. Nor is it comfortable with the social conservatives’ pettiness and nannyism. The multi-racial, multi-ethnic, more tolerant society that pundits discovered on Election Day has been in place in Edge Cities for quite some time.
When you invest the new technocrats with power, you may also find that they have no truck for traditional ways of lobbying, back-slapping and deal-making. Instead, government may well be a much more disciplined (there’s that word again!) force to simply get things done. So if you want a glimpse of the kind of person whom Obama should and will bring in to run things, I suggest you bypass asking John Kerry and his ilk, and instead go straight to Rick Klau.
