Gene Fisk works at home in Silicon Valley on a startup he founded with his dad. He’s got a little baby and since his wife works, he doesn’t see much of her. They’re new to town and don’t know that many people.
“I’m pretty bad at networking, and it’s kind of — it’s just damn lonely!†he says.
It’s hard to stay on task. Really hard. He drinks coffee at room temperature so he can get it down faster.
He was never especially into phones until he and his wife bought a small, cheap Nexus tablet to use as a baby monitor. They liked it, so he bought his wife a Nexus 4. He thought the stock Android operating system was way better than the “bloated software†on his HTC Amaze 4G, so he ordered the Nexus 5 for himself.
The process of obsessively researching phones coincided with Fisk’s discovery of Google+. Despite the fact that he’s in his mid-30s, Fisk had never gotten into Facebook (he thought it was too ugly looking), but he got sucked into Google+. He would “get riled up†when people in his network posted what he considered to be lame articles about phones.
“It starts small and someone will come in and say something that is just, you know, like either obnoxious or inaccurate,†says Fisk. “Like, this guy basically just vomited up a couple specs, like: ‘The camera’s going to be this many megapixels and stuff,’ and they were all wrong!â€
Marooned in his home office, pounding tepid coffee, Fisk meandered down the path of calling various journalists and commenters “idiots†in his posts. Especially those who unfairly bashed Android. He had, without realizing it, become a fanboy.
“I can bitch anonymously, and I’ve tried to tone it back, because I let it get to me,†he says.
But that’s not all that gets to Fisk. He has a meta-frustration that seems to be always vibrating in his mental circuitry, like a hum you can’t place. It has to do with the power that technology companies wield over his life.
He talks about being “trapped in his contract†with his former phone carrier, and about being unable to receive Android updates because of some Machiavellian plot on the part of the manufacturer to force consumers to upgrade their phones. He paints Apple as a ruthless force that effectively killed Flash, the software plug-in favored by designers, by refusing to support it on Apple’s mobile devices. At the time, Fisk made his living as a Flash developer.
“Apple to me is just a gigantic, media-bending smokescreen,†he complains.
The frustration he feels has led him to rally behind the one company he feels might actually be doing something good in the world: Google. He loves not just the phones, but the company in general. He notes that Google has invested in aging research and helped wire the city of Kansas City, where he used to live. He says it could charge more for its Nexus phones, but doesn’t.
“I’m sure they do nefarious stuff, but they seem like a decent company,†says Fisk. “The world wants a big company to be behind.â€
Fisk talks about Google as if it’s a political candidate running for control of the universe. With every “you’re an idiot†post he makes online, he’s unwittingly helping campaign for its world domination.
