High Tech Surprises

As a result of billions of dollars invested in preventative public relation and marketing measures, the environmental movement has evolved into a reality for big business. The magnitude of effort allocated to sway public perception and avert the inevitable clash with special interests groups could transform the combined ice at the poles of the inner planets to water vapor. For one Redmond, Washington based company, the movement began twenty years ago.

The familiar green shade of the Windows XP start button and software packaging design extends well beyond the obvious metaphor relating to an abundance of money. While legions of current Microsoft stockholders once upon a time inhabited the company’s campus as software code custodians, a disturbing cycle was set into motion and has since been interwoven amidst Windows products.

The environment surrounding the Microsoft human productivity infrastructure provides a fertile ground for independent, yet flawed ideology. Faced with a unique set of working conditions and financial flexibility, the typical MS employee does not subscribe to a conservative political agenda or adulation towards economic prosperity. The staunch onset of liberalism roams freely amidst an expanding campus of privately funded futuristic buildings, landscaped forests and mass transit terminals. The magnitude of the billions invested abundantly and equally between man, machine and building alike, completely overshadowed by radical inclinations. Whether or not the customary 16 hour workday or the dual use of office space for productivity and lodging contributes to the extreme politics of the campus is irrelevant. The fact remains that a new class of influential progressive exists in the Puget Sound region and in cyberspace, armed with disposable income and the absence of social awareness. Unless Microsoft can regain its lost identity from the inside out, the green movement of windows will transfrom gold to dust.

Proof of this ideological anomaly can actually be found within the confines of Microsoft products. Below are two enjoyable experiments that can be conducted on any Windows XP computer.

1. Use the thesaurus in MS Word to lookup the varying word associations for liberal and conservative.

2. Open a new file in Notepad
Type bush hid the facts
Save the file to your desktop to a filename of your choice
Close the file
Open the file (surprise!)