Larry and Sergey: A Valediction ⇥ roughtype.com

Nicholas Carr:

Larry Page and Sergey Brin spent the first fifteen years of their careers building the greatest information network the world has ever known and the last five trying to escape it. Having made everything visible, they made themselves invisible. Larry has even managed to keep the names of his two kids secret, an act of paternal love that is also, given Google’s mission “to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful,” an act of corporate treason.

Larry Page’s efforts have made it trivial to find virtually anyone’s contact information, date of birth, siblings, and address, but effectively impossible to find his children’s names. Mark Zuckerberg wants to make everyone in the world closer, except his neighbours.

They’re fully aware of the problems they have played a part in creating, but the business models of the companies they started are dependent on everyone else not figuring that out.