Google Zürich Takes Their Servers on a Vipassana Retreat
Humans left on their own to do the work for the next ten days
This morning, the renowned Zürich office of Google leased a cargo Boeing 737 to take their entire collection of servers to a national park near Kolkata, India. The plane’s only human passenger was the Vipassana guru Sam Harris, who is set to guide these servers to their collective disillusionment of the self.
“The trip is long overdue”, says Alexander Zverev, social engineer at Google Zürich, who were among the first to notice signs of fatigue, stress, and anxiety in the servers over two years ago. “No one cared!”, Zverev goes on, and further recounts walking into the server hall one morning and being shocked by the heat generated by the computers. “There was simply no question about it, these computers had been working all night!”.
Some months later Dustin Brown, psychologist at Psycho-Google Analytics, began expressing concerns, after seeing “problematic” patterns in the servers’ dreams. Brown, who performs his psychoanalysis through Google’s DeepDream tool, began to see the psychedelic dogs and cats usually displayed in their dreams be swapped out by goth-girls, Pepe the frogs and Hentai imagery.
In a long letter to the board signed by entire staffs of several of the “Computeriora” departements of Google, the authors demanded a wide array of actions for the servers, including an extensive survey of their emotional health, a union agreement, and not the least — an annual 10 day silent retreat.
Sam Harris, who was interviewed by the Guardian right before the departure of the plane, confirmed hastingly: “I’m glad someone is finally taking this issue seriously”. Harris, who habitually utilizes the anafor of “having no head” to dispel the self, admits that this Vipassana tool and others will not have the same effect on the computers as they do on humans. “Naturally, this retreat will have a larger focus on the disillusion of the digital self – no social media allowed and so forth, but I trust it will prove as effective. If not more”, said Harris, and added jokingly: “None of them will remember their own GUID after this trip, rest assured”. The Google representatives however, were not amused, and we are told Sam Harris delayed the flight by 45 minutes having to prove in an emergency “call” to Larry Page that he indeed, was joking.
