It’s Google’s sandbox and nobody is there to supervise it

ChuckLorre.com Screenshot

Chuck Lorre, on his vanity card¹ after The Big Bang Theory Season 5 Episode 21, on how the world is like a sandbox without the supervising adults:

For me, the epiphany came in my second season on „Roseanne“. At thirty-nine years old I finally woke up to the fact that the principles I was taught as a child, like fairness and justice, have no place in the world of power and money

(…)

Ideas like „play nice“, „share your toys“, „no name-calling“, „take turns“ and „misbehaving gets punished“ still resonate inside me as if they were some sort of fundamental truths. Of course, I now know that they are not.

At best, they’re ideals. Lofty goals to aspire to. The truisms of the real world and more along the lines of „my ball, my bat, my rules“ and „money talks, bull$#*! walks“.

He talks about it in the context of Hollywood and the 2012 United States presidential elections but to be honest before he even brings up the elections I thought about Larry Page’s recent „2012 Update from the CEO“.

We all expect Google to be nice. To play by the rules. Because Google said so in the past.

The problem is: there is no supervising adult standing next to Google and us in the sandbox. And Google just took our bat. And nobody is going to prevent it from taking our shovel and our bike as well if we don’t draw a line in the sand.

1 – unfortunately the vanity card isn’t online yet