Don’t Be Evil Won’t Avoid Evil

“Don’t Be Evil.” If you’ve followed the tech industry long enough, you know that used to be Google’s motto. Whatever happened to that Google? We could ask that of our attempts at mere avoidance of evil, too.

If you were online during the first part of this millennium, you remember the scrappy upstart Google. Its website was startlingly basic looking even for the time, but it had fantastic search. That was the point: no glitz, just really good search we all loved.

To understand how much of a treat that was is to reminisce about the late 90’s Internet. As it became more available to all of us, we encountered a deluge of fun, useful and crazy things — fruit of people experimenting to figure out what the Internet could do. But it was also a season where we watched Microsoft make its web browser more and more dominant and unavoidable for functioning in that online Wild West.

If you were using a Mac or Linux or — the audacity! — wanted to run Netscape on Windows, it became increasingly hard to do the everyday tasks you might set out to accomplish.

“Best Viewed with Microsoft Internet Explorer” felt like a threat, not a promise by the turn of the millennium. In place of widely compatible tools, limited as they may have been, were ones increasingly locked into the Windows maker’s control. Sites nonetheless opted into that “MSIE” lockdown because they could count on it on every Windows computer — a 90% majority. And, if that weren’t enough, it tempted non-standard ways of creating sites because they were easier to create (and worked great), so long as you only supported Microsoft’s browser.

Everyone who knew about tech knew Microsoft’s 1990s tactics were unsavory, which is what made Google so refreshing. The startup felt more like a rewind to the pre-Microsoft dominated Internet. When it said it was going to live by the motto “Don’t Be Evil,” it felt like a valiant stand against the singular Tech Giant’s hostile takeover.

And Google seemed to live it throughout everything it did. The early Google search didn’t have evil ads that tried to trick you, like other search engines. It wasn’t weighed down with useless cruft. And, it used every standard possible. Once again, the very leading edge of the Internet — Google — was available to any halfway Internet capable device.

It felt like a push towards a second golden age in the early Internet. After the Windows storm tried to wreck everything, a new generation of tech entrepreneurs offered something better.

The early 2000’s were genuinely a great time for the Internet. Soon after Google, Mozilla got its act together and Firefox emerged as a truly good web browser for every major platform. After years of stalling, web browser development sped up and new things started to become possible online again.

There was this beautiful season in which Don’t Be Evil meant: let’s actually do what makes it easier to be on the Internet together. Apple launched a browser, then Google built its own on top. Early Chrome was actually innovative and good in its own right. We seemed, for an all too brief moment, to have reached a genuinely good place: companies and organizations working together in ways that benefitted users and helped information flow.

It was wonderful, but it tested the limits of “Don’t Be Evil.” Long focused on what the Tech Giant did and how Google ought not to do it, the search-turned-everything-Internet company found it a much harder motto to live by once it was a “giant.” Soon, the proverbial David seemed a lot more like a Goliath: they began to put in their own non-standard bits that would lead to the bad old days of “Best if Viewed By” again, only with Google’s browser in place of Microsoft’s.

With the purchase of ad networks, a mobile operating system and countless other ventures, Google now reaches into every part of our lives — even healthcare — allowing it to be invasive in our lives in ways 1990’s Microsoft only dreamt of. Don’t be… evil?

I’m struck by how much Google is a giant metaphor for our own dalliances with evil and avoidance thereof. The danger of trying to “Don’t Be Evil” is it seldom — never, really — arrives at “Good.” At its best, the standard of not being evil isn’t much of a standard. When that is our modus operandi, it eventually becomes tempting to do what Google did and just quit saying it at all.

When we think, “how do I live by ‘Don’t Be Evil,’” we’re really committing to reflecting on the negative and trying to avoid it. “Here’s an evil thing, and I’m not going to do it. Here’s another evil thing, and I’m not going to do it.”

There’s a reason why the non-proverbial, real life David fell into trouble later in life. He quit focusing on what he should be doing. It’s why in the Book of Proverbs, the focus isn’t on “Don’t Be Evil,” but on living by doing what’s good.

Evil actions — even evil thoughts — actually break down the very human community God intends for us.

When all these web standards were coming up, we saw an amazing burst of fruit. Early Gmail and Google Maps pushed the absolute limits of what we imagined could show up on the web. Apple’s iPhones made great use of Google and everything else by showing the standards compliant web in your pocket.

Informal communities came together and said, “let’s implement this and we’ll do it together so everyone can use it.” And it was great — until those ugly little non-standard things crept back in. They may not all seem evil, some seem like they are just the absence of good, but in the end, the latter is the path to the former.

That starts to break down community. And that’s how merely avoiding being outright evil works. What happens when we plot, even if we don’t immediately act on those plots? We break down trust. We break down community.

As Proverbs 3:29-30 says, “Do not devise evil against your neighbor, for he trustfully dwells beside you. Do not accuse a man without cause, when he has done you no harm.”

It’s not talking about “don’t go through your neighborhood and cause all kinds of trouble.” It’s saying don’t even contemplate evil.

Sometimes it feels like thinking about the evil we could do will serve as catharsis so we keep our real life actions in line. We think thinking about sin maybe is a good way to avoid doing sin. It doesn’t work that way.

Too often today I see professing Christians who feel like they can contemplate — and speak of — all kinds of evil, so long as they do less of it than some other group set as benchmark. The doing gap keeps shrinking, unsurprisingly.

Just venting internally may feel like a big “don’t be evil” win, but it inevitably spills over.

All the time Google fixed on “don’t be evil like Microsoft” was time they contemplated the “evil” things but chose not to do the evil thing. When King David himself went idle — “I’m not actively doing evil, at least!” — instead of focusing on doing good, he hit his absolute nadir of adultery and murder. What would have happened instead if they’d contemplated what would be good to do?

A lot of our “Don’t Be Evil” vs. “be good” moments are concerning far more serious things than web browsers. Maybe not murder, like David, but nonetheless sobering. It is surprisingly easy for us to slide from “Don’t Be Evil” to “I’ll go ahead and do a little evil” and then “I shall unleash a lot of evil, because I like it.”

When we formulate evil, even when we plan not to do it, what do we know if we’re willing to admit it? We’re going to be tempted to do it. “Don’t be evil” isn’t a virtue, it’s a vice masquerading as virtue.

The Proverb above doesn’t imply we can get it all right or we’ll earn God’s favor by moving from “Don’t Be Evil” to “Be Good.” He’s the one who’s truly good, not us.

But, a lot can change when we realize how good God has been to us. If He lived by “Don’t Be Evil,” our lives would be quite dismal. Google’s old motto may slow our path to being evil, but it won’t stop it.

Following God’s good gets us someplace far richer in the end.