“See Naples and die” is an old saying that probably dates back to 19th-century England.

It wasn’t intended to be taken literally, of course. It meant that once you’d seen Naples in Italy, it would spoil you for anywhere else.

However, maybe we need a new iteration for the 21st century. My suggestion: “See the Googleplex and/or die”.

Why? Well, in today’s wirelessed-up world there’s not much mileage left in the old ways of doing things. If you’re a writer of some sort by profession, you adopt new technology or … die. And I mean the very latest new-tech stuff.

A year or so ago, I was using desktop software, standard telephony, a PDF creator and a laser printer as the basic tools of my trade in addressing the needs of print and, occasionally, online media.

Now personal media and Web services dominate my working virtual space. That must be true for anyone who seriously wants to be a player in the contemporary world. An old Buddhist image comes into the mind’s eye: Indra’s Net.

Indra’s Net is a metaphor for how the universe really is. It’s a vast collection of jewels, each one of which reflects all the rest, and is in turn reflected by all the others. The jewels represent each one of us, but it’s also a perfect analogue of the Internet.

And so, back to the Googleplex. Google has created a new way of working that’s midway between employment and freelance. Twenty percent of staff are millionaires. Each is allowed 20 percent of the working week to spend researching personal projects. Everything onsite is free. It’s more like a club than a factory. Above all it’s innovation-led. And just a little crazy.

A vast server-farm of inhouse-built PCs dominates the strategy. Data centers are being secretly contructed inside shipping containers ready to be placed at nodes in a network of “dark fiber” which is now being bought up by the Googlers. It’s all done by them, never mind the 80-20 principle. It’s like one, vast hobbyists’ paradise.

So, for all of us today, working in the most amorphous of circumstances, nothing but imaginative enterprise will do. “See the Googleplex and/or die”.