In July 2017, James Damore wrote and circulated his memo. He was fired the following month. Soon after, there were all these leaks of conversations within Google that got sent to his lawyers—screenshots of email threads or internal Google Plus threads. A lot of the posts had nothing to do with the memo. In many cases, they were written years before the memo. But Damore’s legal counsel used them to make Google look like one big evil leftist conspiracy.
Then the leaks ended up on right-wing sites. A bunch of Googlers found themselves getting doxed and getting death threats. A lot of people were pretty scared. People’s photos were getting posted on 4chan and Stormfront and 8chan and all these other terrible sites.7 A bunch of well-known alt-right provocateurs, including Vox Day and Milo Yiannopoulos and various others on Breitbart, were involved.What was the reaction to all of that within Google?
We were completely blindsided. There had never been any culture of leaking internal posts to score political points before. Or of people getting doxed and threatened. And the company didn’t know how to deal with it.
Google has a physical security group that is very responsive. If there is an earthquake or a natural disaster or something, they call all the Googlers in the area to ensure they’re safe and to provide help if needed. But for this kind of online attack, they didn’t have a clue what to do.
Initially, there was no official support from Google for the Googlers who were affected. We got sent some useless stock resources that told us not to use our real name and address online—ironic, given the Google Plus controversy. Nobody seemed to have any idea what the hell was going on.Was there any kind of response from upper management?
Google’s lawyers made the argument that the court should redact employees’ names because they weren’t relevant to the lawsuit. Eventually the judge agreed, and the docs that were leaked were retroactively redacted from the official court website.
But by then the screenshots were all over the most toxic parts of the right-wing internet. You can’t remove stuff once it’s gotten out there. Some Googlers put together a letter to management asking for more resources for keeping the workplace safe. Basic things, like having codes of conduct on internal mailing lists that were unmoderated. But the letter was largely ignored.Were many people you worked with sympathetic to Damore?
I don’t know the numbers. Nobody I worked closely with. On some mailing lists, there were certainly people who took his firing as proof that Google was biased against conservative employees. Of course, the downside of Google’s mailing list culture is that it’s easy for twenty or thirty people to troll every thread.How would you characterize the politics of people within Google, and within the tech industry more broadly?
Tech has an eclectic mix of political beliefs.
I would say that most rank-and-file people in tech tend to be on the liberal or socialist side of the spectrum. They believe in democratic institutions and government and things like that. But then you also have very libertarian people. For them, governments are bad at understanding technology. Therefore any regulation will be unhelpful or misguided or even straight-up malicious. Governments shouldn’t try to regulate technology, so it’s useless—or worse—for them to try.
Then you have the actual executives of these companies, who are often socially liberal but very fiscally conservative. They’re multimillionaires or billionaires, so they would rather not pay taxes. They do everything that they can to reduce the taxes that the corporation pays and the taxes that they personally pay, because it’s a huge chunk of their net worth.
The politics of tech mostly falls into this tripartite division.It’s hard to separate the Damore controversy from the political context of the 2016 election and its aftermath, which really energized the alt-right and the other right-wing elements that you described. But in that same period, you also start to see a more critical mood about tech and a sharper tone toward Silicon Valley from mainstream journalists and politicians—a cultural shift that is sometimes called the “techlash” today. How did that shift manifest within Google?
As long as I can remember, there was always a basic recognition within Google that big tech companies have real power—that their decisions can affect the geopolitics of the whole world. In 2010, very early in my tenure at Google, the company pulled out of China because the Chinese Communist Party was hacking into Gmail accounts belonging to dissidents and reporters.8 Up to that point, Google had been offering censored search results on Google.cn. In response to the hacking, the company said they would start providing uncensored search results or nothing at all—which quickly became nothing at all.
So it was always clear that what we did mattered. And that recognition was what motivated the rank-and-file campaign around the Google Plus real-names policy: people saw that there were downsides to the policy that would negatively affect certain groups.
But I would say that 2016 and the aftermath brought these issues into much sharper focus. Algorithmic news feeds, fake news, content that’s misleading or scammy or worse—Cambridge Analytica is one famous example.9
Overall, there was more and more of an understanding within Google and within the tech industry more generally of the consequences of what our companies were building. And it felt like a real departure from the old techno-utopian idea that if you just provide access to information, everything will turn out great. People on the internet are jerks. You have to design your systems with the assumption that hostile actors are going to try to use them to do bad things in various ways. And those actors aren’t always just individual assholes. They’re often part of large, well-coordinated groups. We’re in the middle of a planetary information war.
Do the Right ThingHow did that greater understanding of the consequences of what the tech industry was building feed into the rank-and-file campaigns within Google against Project Maven and Dragonfly?10
This returns to our discussion
