Karp’s dissertation is from 2002. And yet it suggests so much about how Silicon Valley views more recent questions concerning communication and the public sphere. Interestingly enough, Karp never actually makes the critique I just imputed to him: he tiptoes up to the line of claiming for Walser a right to transgress for the sake of transgressing, a right to rebel against strictures of decorum—a sensibility that we would today identify as trolling. And then he moves on to his works cited. Was Walser right? Was his speech an example of the public sphere working as intended, or a sign of social cohesion around public expression beginning to fray? Instead of answering, Karp cuts to the credits. Although Karp wrote the dissertation shortly before he transitioned to Silicon Valley, his dissertation already had one discursive gambit of the tech industry exactly right: a curious refusal of confrontation. Peter Thiel is fond of joking that “competition is for losers,” and in the marketplace of ideas, Silicon Valley seems to largely agree with him.
Silicon Valley has a habit of pretending to have a debate when in fact desiring no such thing. One version of this is reflected in the infamous “Google memo” that James Damore uploaded to a Google internal mailing list in July 2017, and which quickly leaked to the media. In the memo, Damore argued against diversity efforts at the company, essentially suggesting that lack of representation at Google, especially of women and people of color, was the result of biological factors rather than discrimination or structural inequality. The memo caused an immediate uproar. Damore was eventually fired, and has since made having been fired his full-time job. Writing in The New York Times, the columnist and professional tone policeman David Brooks framed the fracas as one huge disappointment: “What we have is a legitimate tension,” he suggested, and lamented that our public discourse lacked the subtlety to reconcile it. Many commentators on the right echoed his hand-wringing about the fact that we “no longer” had the shared framework to debate the vital issues of the day. What they missed (probably often intentionally) was that the Google memo didn’t fall victim to the lack of a shared neutral framework but rather exploited the absence of one.
It’s worth parsing out the rhetorical gestures in this document—because Damore is good at making it look like he is doing something without actually doing it. And people like Brooks—who isn’t the most careful reader on his best of days—were determined to believe the document actually intervened in some debate rather than exploited the fact that there was no other reaction Damore’s intervention could have elicited. According to the memo, titled “Google’s Ideological Echo Chamber,” Damore wants to advance the health of the company and, indeed, society. In a handy chart, Damore juxtaposes progressive and conservative personality types, which he extends to societies and companies. “A company too far to the right may be slow to react, overly hierarchical, and untrusting of others.”
Damore is very careful to hedge: after dividing people, societies, and companies along these axes, he allows that “neither side is 100% correct and both viewpoints are necessary for a functioning society or, in this case, company.” So is the “ideological echo chamber” mentioned in the memo’s title a problem because it hampers the company from functioning properly? (Google is currently valued at around $730 billion; one wonders what it would be worth if functioning properly.) Or because it would finally make more pragmatic a company that’s famous for dreaming up things people couldn’t have conceived of even a decade prior? Or because it is unfair to treat more pragmatically minded people differently, just because a company is idealistic?
Every one of these readings is possible, and none of them make any sense. Damore can’t say whether he’s making a normative or pragmatic argument, whether he is making one that concerns society in general or the company he works at in particular. He can’t say whether he’s standing up for the company as a whole or for individual people working there. He can’t say how conservative business practices are supposed to be analogous to conservative personality structures. But perhaps more important than the fact that he can’t is the fact that he badly wants to.
In general, the memo seems intent on having the meanings of words carry over from use to use in ways that are almost impossible. It charts a juxtaposition such as “Change is good (unstable)” versus “Change is dangerous (stable),” and then plugs anything and everything into that matrix. Is a person who thinks that it’s good to shake up a teachers’ union really a “progressive”? Isn’t a person who wants his employer to get rid of all contraceptive coverage being idealistic rather than pragmatic? The point here isn’t that Damore’s chart makes little sense. It’s that any sense it does make is made only when words are forced to retain their uses and definitions well beyond the limits of what everyday experience teaches us can be expected.
So whatever we want to say about the Google memo, we can say that David Brooks had it wrong. It’s not that poor James Damore made an honest overture to the closed-minded (but “unstable”) libs and they turned on him. It’s that he sent a message meant to be misunderstood. To engage with it at all is to get tripped up in its terminology, to chafe against assumptions it has to
