Google Drive is production
Art: Composition with Grid IX, Piet Mondrian, 1919
A couple weeks ago, Jack Dorsey tweeted that he was donating money to fighting COVID. A whole lot of money.
And he did it in a Google Sheet, which, in an interesting twist, is open to everyone.
#startsmall tracker - Google Sheets
Donations Total Value Created:, $ 1,906,098,954.40 Total Disbursed:, $ 618,481,561.00 Total Remaining: , $ 1,287,617,393.40 Date, Amount ,Grantee,Twitter,Link,Why? 10/27/2023,$250,000,Private School Village,@villageprivate,<a href="https://www....
In researching (and interacting with) Jack previously, he doesn’t exactly strike me as the kind of person who would carefully track things in a Google Doc.
After all,
Jack also loves to talk about his meditation schedule, intermittent fasting, and SaunaSpace. He also uses something called an Oura Ring to track his sleep, and he drinks “salt juice” (water, Himalayan salt, and lemon - I guess he’s working on self-actualizing into becoming a conductor of electricity?)
Looking at the sheet, there are a number of points for further investigation. We could talk about the charities he picked, the fact that he hasn’t updated it since 4/14, and the calculus of transferring Square shares to pay for all of this.
But what’s most interesting to me is just how ordinary is it from an actual spreadsheet perspective. It has equations. It has links. It has tabs. Billonaires - they’re just like us! They freeze panes to lock in rows and columns!
I think the much bigger story here, though, is that absolutely everyone uses Google Drive, simply because it’s a tool all of us, regardless of status, class, or how many companies we own, have ambiently available in our digital lives. In much the same way that Excel still powers the financial economy (and lots, lots of other things), Google Docs has risen as a cloud complement. The worse story is that, since it’s tied to Google, an ecosystem that almost everyone is a part of, and because its consumer version is free, it’s wormed its way into the operational systems of companies where it now lives like a very dangerous Swiss army knife, used for anything and everything without thought given to the implications.
For example, after the botched Iowa caucus in January, Nevada tried to record some of its election results through Google Drive,
Details on the new system are patchy, but it seems that at least some caucuses will be tabulating and reporting their results through a combination of Google Forms and associated spreadsheets. There’s also some indication that Google Forms may be used to check voters in at caucus locations, although in both cases, there will be other options available as a safeguard.
On the tech side, the state party is operating from a regular enterprise G-Suite account, apparently connected with off-the-shelf iPads.
And, as I wrote earlier, schools are fully embracing Google Docs for students and staff alike. In tech, Google Sheets are also often used to share salaries in order to give employees negotiational leverage. From my own personal experience, they’re often used to collaborate on writing and editing books, editorials, and petitions, and as invoice systems for places that pay freelance writers, including lots of fun personal information such as addresses and bank account and routing numbers.
The more I think about it, the more I’m convinced that the world now runs on Google, and if Google Docs ever went down, it would be an even larger blow to the economy than Zoom or Excel at this point, but that the more it stays up, the more this cloud app owned entirely by Google becomes the most dangerous weakest link in all of our workflows.
This is not an exaggeration. A couple days ago, I put out a call for crazy Google Docs use cases, and got them in spades.
Here are some of my favorite ones:
GDocs as a payment system:
GDocs as a chat platform:
Google Docs as a lunch resolution service:
And, finally, as a development platform:
Nothing could possibly go wrong
