Slouching Toward Somethingorother

I drive into Dublin from the airport on a drizzly Monday morning at dawn to find the city papered with posters that alternately demand YES and NO. They all seem really reasonable:

“YES to Jobs”
“NO to War”
“YES to Europe”

And so forth, sometimes stacked on top of one another in a surrealist totem pole of jingoistic truisms. I could easily imagine an art experiment whereby the logic is drawn out further:

“YES to sunlight”
“NO to child molesters”
“YES to puppies and grandmothers”
“NO to the bubonic plague”

Given the nonsense going on in the United States, supposedly over health care though the whole thing in the States has taken on more of a one-size-fits-all Timothy McVeigh tone of voice on the right, this smells like a blustery bit of bullshitting on the part of local politicans, but I never could have guessed the sheer surreal pointlessness of the argument in question. Turns out the entire city of Dublin has been tee-peed on behalf of an impenetrable bureaucratic document known as The Lisbon Accord, an effort to revamp EU organizational rules. The treaty is so long and arcane that even its supporters admit to never having read it, but its sheer opacity has turned it into an unlikely Rorschach blot.

Various demagogues are looking to enhance their national image on the back of this long, innocuous document. Taken in itself it has the inherent sexiness of a day spent draining bed pans at a nursing home combined with the soaring, evocative prose style of the interminable cubit measurements found in the Book of Leviticus, but here I am talking about it for several paragraphs so I guess we shouldn’t underestimate its allure.

My taxi driver is happy to propound the various conspiracy theories that are making the rounds at length. If passed, it will require conscription of an Irish force for immediate deployment to Afghanistan. It will force the country to legalize abortion. If not passed, the Euro will be withdrawn and the Irish banking system will collapse. A mysterious new political organization with the sinister name “Libertas” straight out of “The Da Vinci Code” has sprung to life and rallied the Irish people against it. No one knows where they came from our how their leader is funded, though many say – and I quote – “the US Army” backs them in an attempt to drive a wedge in European unity.

Various other fringe groups have jumped on board in an attempt to capture the public’s heart and thus one day the legislature, much to the chagrin of the stale barristers in Lisbon who prolongedly negotiated it into existence and assumed the various national legislatures would duly ratify it. But the Irish constitution dictates that all such treaties go to a vote, and the confused electorate have become fired up on the topic in a way they rarely do with issues that actually impact their lives in some measurable way. They’ve rejected the treaty twice, and the government keeps sticking it in front of them like a used-car salesman who won’t take “no” for an answer.

Meanwhile despite the global economic downturn – which is especially pronounced here in Dublin – Polish work crews are filling potholes and Ukranian baristas pound out lattes at breakneck pace in Starbucks across the city. Migration has slowed to a trickle, but the Europeans who already came here are sticking it out. When I pop into my favourite local pub The Cobblestone, a Slovenian gypsy string quartet still plays in the backroom to a packed audience as top Irish folk musicians jam in the front. Who knows if in twenty years the two styles will have influenced one another in profound and surprising ways.

I’m here for my last bit of work before the sabbatical officially begins, Google’s European Partner Day, where I will present our vision of the future for publishers to a couple hundred website entrepreneurs and big-wigs from across Europe. So I spend the first day tying up loose ends at work, then head out for a kebab at Zaytoon and a Guinness at The Bleeding Horse (a classic old pub featured in Ulysses) with my brothers-in-arms Tim Evans and Jacoby Thwaites from London and Atul Bhandari from Silicon Valley. The Bleeding Horse is old Dublin at its best – lots of nooks and crannies filled with lovers & inebriated mates and an open tap of Guinness at half the tables. Damn that local Guinness is delicious – it’s like ice cream here. And you can see why the city mourns for parochial old Dublin, and half-heartedly wishes to keep the world out despite the economic benefits.

The next morning at seven thirty I am awoken by my manically buzzing Google phone. It’s Pia Maltri, a remarkable young Italian woman who is organizing the event and leaves no stone unturned in ensuring that everything today goes like clockwork. As I sleepwalk through the day, going from keynote address on the future with Google, patiently explaining the intricacies of the new system where we open up AdSense to various and sundry ad networks to create a virtual stock exchange of buyers and sellers (imagine the demagogues getting ahold of that one), to breakout sessions on the importance of display and a panel of experts on the future of Internet advertising, Pia is never far away. When I stray off to a conference room to catch a half-hour nap, she dials to make sure I make it to the next session. At one point she dials my phone while I’m on the toilet. That said, Pia is really a singularly lovely person and it’s a pleasure to work with her; but I start to suspect over time that she has been warned that I am some kind of wild-card, and that it’s her job to keep me on the reservation.

The day winds down and they pack all 200 of us up and take us to a palatial old nineteenth century ballroom where we dine and drink. What an amazing group. There is the French serial start-upper who spends his spare time building cool new applications for our phone. The Croatian social network owner and the Spanish manager of Madrid’s main TV station and the German guy with an insanely successful online game site. There is old media and new,: the struggling Norwegian newspaperwoman and the guy who runs a popular network of blog sites, all of them struggling to find the right answer to how to transmit news and opinion in this strange new era. All of them rely on us to fund their business through Adsense; it’s both energizing and humbling to know we make all of these businesses possible, and that we have a profound responsibility to keep partnering with them properly.

These folks live a lot better than their American counterparts. It leaks out that I’m about to go on sabbatical and I am peppered with stories of the Dutch guy who sailed around the world in 18 months, the Austrian who quits his job every two years and heads straight for unexplored corners southeast Asia, and so forth. These are people I can understand, lions of the new industry though they may be.

Before we depart we are subjected to a Riverdance-style folk dance performance and a soprano singing “Oh Danny Boy”. So there are some aspects of old Ireland that no one can reasonably miss. And I love the new Europe, its energy and openness, the tangled web of languages and influences that enrich one another in surprising instances and point the way toward a better future for us all. Bring it on!