By Catherine A. Fitzpatrick
Google server room. Photo by Brian Ussery
So there's a weepy story in Wired about the Googlers all aghast that their company was going to do business with the US military with their new AI tech.
More than two years ago, Googlers pulled together as employees, using internal social media on the job to organize -- with management's encouragement -- to fight Trump's travel ban Of course it's in their business interest to combat such unjustified restrictions, as Google relies on a lot of engineers from other countries who come here on H1 visas. It was an example of how the Google is like a state within a state -- like Google's help to the Obama team to win the presidency. Here's a company that in the US, only in the last year or so began to employ worldwide (98,000) something approaching the number of the people that General Motor employees (173,000) (all the big IT companies together don't equal the manufacturing industries in the US, even with a lot of jobs shipped abroad) The tech industry supplies jobs to highly-skilled engineers pretty much, and not a lot of jobs to ordinary people as traditional industries have -- they its left flank has an outsized influence on politics.
Obviously, Google needs to keep growing -- the cultic belief in growth is the foundation of all these big IT companies -- they try to get into China and fail and come back; they try to get into the Cloud even though Amazon and Oracle beat them to it -- they're even now instituting the social Darwinism of cutting pay and raising bonus percentages for sales of their Cloud services.
Google isn't a philanthropy or a democracy -- it's a business, even if (as I've often said) it's a business sort of modeled after the Soviet Knowledge Society seeing as its mission putting into effect the vision of H.G. Wells and Maxim Gorky to make a total encyclopedia of the world's knowledge accessible to ordinary people. Of course, they get to pick which knowledge is important and the People see first...
But like other tech companies maturing over the years and learning that they need to curb their misogynist and racist bro culture and need to do things like "make a profit" and "sell products" not at a loss, Google has had to grow up and talk to the Man. Much more lately, with all the concern about privacy and undermining of elections.
Google Should Accept US Military Contracts
I personally see absolutely nothing wrong with Google or any company accepting contracts with the US military or any part of government. To be sure, that means dealing with the awful Trump administration, which I didn't (or 90% of Googlers) vote for, but these deals are longer term than any one president and in this case are about America's national security. America is a liberal democracy, even under Trump -- we still call ourselves that because of the massive media and civic response to the racism and misogyny of Trump that still curbs his excesses -- and brings us the hope of replacing him with a Democrat. Even if you think Trump has done such damage that no cooperation with the government is possible (what, farmers should cease taking subsidies? We should forego accepting Social Security? No more roads should be built and our nuclear weapons shouldn't be maintained?), you still might contemplate that there are worse things out there -- look at the leaders of Russia or China or Iran or North Korea.
There is nothing inherently wrong with Amazon or Google helping the government with AI or any capacity needed in the military. If they believe their tech is using the commit human rights abuses at home or abroad, they need to do due diligence and not just talk in rabid, hysterical generalities like the anti-ICE movement which Google employees now take part in. If you don't like the policies on immigration this administration has -- I don't -- trying to attack or disrupt or dismantle ICE won't change them -- would you like Trump merely to use the National Guard to perform the same services? ICE definitely commits abuses, like all government agencies, but in a democracy you campaign and litigate against them and change law and policy -- you don't destroy them like an anarchist. It's not a solution as you are left then only with totalitarian anarchists running things instead of a system of checks and balances.
Isn't Internal Social Media a Huge Time-Waster Costing the Company Money?!
Reading this piece, I can't help thinking that the real problem here is the tolerance for internal social media in the company. My God, what a boondoggle! Do other companies have such nonsense? I can't imagine IBM or Wendy's allowing this madness. Slack is bad enough, if they use them. Letting employees post all day about all kinds of topics unrelated to their work is supposed to be part of this genius theory, whereby you give individuals total intellectual freedom and they produce tech better and innovate more often and productively. Even the Soviets understood this with their sharashkas in the Gulag or the closed cities like Arzamas-16 where Dr. Andrei Sakharov helped build the Soviet hydrogen bomb. We get that.
But social media isn't about creative geniuses doing the hard work of thinking alone at their desks and writing or coding on their computers, wrestling with the material. It's about gabbing with others. Much of the social media madness at Google is about forming various affinity groups based on politics or sexual preferences or lifestyle or hobbies and then expressing on internal boards about them. Madness. Time-wasting. Crazy collectivist boosterism.
Google Should End Internal Social Media
Google should just end all this sillyness. Not only does it fuel animosity and division and lose worker time, it creates reams of data that become a liability once published outside the company. End it!
Imagine, G+, which they had to retire in shame because nobody but a few big photographers who needed free photo storage and free advertising used it. Ordinary people like me who tried it in good faith found that we were in the company of the worst of the worst of Silicon Valley tech culture which isn't only about bros, but about "benevolent dictators" and their "fork or GTFO" mindset. If you criticized anything about Google, or criticized specific Google public figures, they would come after you and threaten you with expulsion from G+ -- and with all their products integrated you wondered if you could get banned from Google Drive or Gmail as well. It was among the harshest climates I've seen on social media, with horrid geeky assholes coming on and harassing people like me who criticized Silicon Valley before its time (now its more fashionable and tolerated) or whose politics didn't jive with the extreme left or libertarian "cosmic engineers".
Google could really put all of this tangled mess out of its misery by just closing all internal social media and encouraging staff to use regular outside social media, with or without their own real names, with a pledge that no one would be fired for what they said on social media with a few very tightly-defined and realistic exceptions, like "exposure of proprietary information" or "incitement of imminent violence."
And this will help put an end to the insubordination that lets a few thousand vocal extremists seize the mindshare with a few lefty journalists and guilt-trip the company into getting out of AI with the military.
One Tech Leader Advocates Cooperation with the Military
I could go on about this, but to my surprise, someone in the industry already has, and compellingly so. While looking up the real person on whom the Silicon Valley character Keenan Feldspar played by Haley Joel Osment, that weird but loveable round-faced robot boy in the movie AI, I discovered it was Palmer Luckey, inventory of the Oculus Rift, the famous rig to view Virtual Reality, which is a "space" that has springs and winters periodically in the venture-capital world and which is now in a downturn. Even so, millions are still being made and it's not going away.
Palmer Luckey and co-author Trey Stevens has said a very real thing about tech giants and their bowing to their minority of extremists among their employees: "Silicon Valley Should Stop Ostracizing the Military."
Indeed. The Internet itself grew out of the US military (DARPA) and is a big customer for all the big tech companies -- why all the hand-wringing?
The United States can no longer take this technology leadership for granted. Its adversaries worldwide are marshaling their tech capabilities, often compelling their best scientists to unify behind the goal of achieving preeminence. Putin in September 2017 said that AI leadership was a means to become “the ruler of the world.” China has vowed to achieve AI dominance by 2030. Moscow and Beijing are aggressively pursuing full-scale tech collaborations between the public and private sectors. Meanwhile, much of the top AI talent in the United States is working on things such as ad optimization. That might contribute to the U.S. economy, but it does nothing to protect against competitors who are using their best and brightest to bolster their militaries.
By all means, let’s debate the ethics surrounding any new technologies with military applications. In one of the knottier dilemmas involving AI and the use of force, we agree with many others that the decision to take a human life should not be made without human direction. But an essential part of ensuring that technologies are used ethically is ensuring that the terms are not dictated by authoritarian regimes. For the United States to set ethical norms and assert a moral high ground, it must first hold the technological high ground.
Exactly. I couldn't have said it more succinctly or compellingly. Why should Google engage in leftist political extremism at the behest of a small faction of only 4,000 employees out of some 100,000 worldwide? Even if there 10 times as many, Google management has to do what is good for business -- and customers -- and if they polled their customers, most would agree that they should do business with the US government rather than ceding the ground to Russia or China or worse. Why is this even a debate?
It's not a debate because rational voices like Luckey's aren't heard -- I didn't even notice this piece until a year later -- and because too many journalists fear being uncool with the tech bros or their own colleagues and won't look around outside the noisy faction causing Google leadership heartburn. But why, indeed, despite their failures in China, can Google still work on a Chinese search engine -- that would have to be censored -- and scorn the US military?! And if you don't want to hear that point from me, here it from Gen. Joseph Dunford, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Google will have only itself to blame for canceling the contract and losing out to Russia and China in the AI race but we all need to care because it harms our country's security. This can't be a question left to only Trump to ask.
Biased Media
And frankly the tech reporters of major media like the Post are also to blame, but not seeking out alternative industry opinion to the faction within Google! Like the VR guy who published later on their pages -- but they could have gone within Google itself, quite frankly.
At least Wired admitted that plenty of tech companies still want US military contracts -- sure they do! They just haven't spoken out as much and neither their leaders or employees have gotten the ear of the liberal media.
Let me show you how Microsoft does it, which actually sells a useful product and doesn't harvest your data in large quantities to sell ads:
Just last month, Microsoft workers wrote to CEO Satya Nadella and company president Brad Smith, asking them to cancel a $479 million Army contract that would let soldiers use Microsoft’s augmented-reality technology, HoloLens, to train for battle. “We did not sign up to develop weapons, and we demand a say in how our work is used,” the letter read.
Nadella rejected their demands in an interviewwith CNN, saying, “We're not going to withhold technology from institutions that we have elected in democracies to protect the freedoms we enjoy.” The response drew scrutiny from Nadella’s fellow technologists and even prompted a New York Times columnist to compare tech military contracts to Dow Chemical’s development of napalm during the Vietnam War.
I have to go see if this same NYT columnist cared as much about Russia's invasion of Ukraine or bombing of Syrians or China's arrest and killing of the Uighurs as they do about US use of napalm in Vietnam.
I also wonder as an aside whether Microsoft's use of Yammer as an internal social media has reached the epic proportions of Google's madness.
Workplace Organizing
I do want to say that while Google management should be free to make their business calls as to whether to work with the US military or China for that matter, and that issues of national politics should be kept from disrupting daily work life, and not encouraged on internal social media to the point that management cannot govern, the issues of labour conditions are different. These are rights. Spouting off about what you think of the Man and the Bomb are not in a private company. That's where freedom of association comes in -- for the company.
I would solve the problem of Google working with China by not working there; as for the US military if that's your belief, then don't work their either. See how that goes. But when it comes to Google's tolerance of sexual harassment in the workplace, and its insistence on internal arbitration before seeking outside legal intervention, employees should organize all they want. They don't need the internal company social media for that -- why would you entrust your adversarial organizing, your workers' rights struggles, to a corporate chat program or board?!
Women at Google -- who are in a distinct minority -- organized and battled management over the internal arbitration issue and won. That's a valid example of employee solidarity and action that's reasonable. Using the means of internal communications to rally about all sorts of outside political issues or the company's decisions perceived as unethical is not. Too much of that struggle is coopted and diluted anyway, regardless of what you think about it. If you think Google shouldn't help the US military, then you would think no tech company should and you should be organizing more substantively by lobbying legislators or trying to get elected or writing or demonstrating in public, not in your Google cubicle (or padded room with nerf balls and organic herbal tea and healthy snacks).
The organizers succeeded, but then three quit and claimed they had suffered retaliation for their protesting. Google denied this, of course. It's hard to know what the real story is but we all know employers don't like whistleblowers even if they make changes due to them.
Nitasha Tiku, author of the Wired piece, seems to imply at the end of the article that the internal social media and routines like structured dialogues between employees with grievances and top leadership were not in use by the extremists anyway.
Over the past three years, the structures that once allowed executives and internal activists to hash out tensions had badly eroded. In their place was a new machinery that the company's activists on the left had built up, one that skillfully leveraged media attention and drew on traditional organizing tactics. Dissent was no longer a family affair. And on the right, meanwhile, the pipeline of leaks running through Google's walls was still going as strong as ever.
Late this June, Project Veritas, a right-wing outlet specializing in stings and exposés, published a slew of leaked documents and snippets of hidden-camera footage from inside Google. One of the items it posted, as if evidence of Google's supposed bias, was a “Beginner's Guide to Protesting” that Google employees had drawn up around the time of the travel ban walkout back in 2017. Next to the document was a message and a link. “Do you work in Big Tech?” it said. “Project Veritas would love to hear from you.
Well, welcome to the real world.
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