2. The mention of TPS reports is a reference to the movie Office Space (1999), where they represent pointless, and mandatory, paperwork.
3. Swift is a programming language developed by Apple for its operating systems, including iOS.
4. Yo is a mobile app initially released in 2014. At first, the app’s only feature was the ability to send the word “Yo” to your friends. Within a few months of launching, Yo boasted a valuation of five to ten million dollars.
5. Google had a contract with the Pentagon to help with Project Maven, an ongoing Pentagon initiative to use machine learning to analyze drone footage. After a monthslong campaign by workers at Google, management announced in June 2018 that it would not be renewing the Project Maven contract.
2. The Technical Writer
1. On November 1, 2018, twenty thousand Googlers, both full-time employees and contract workers, walked out from some fifty offices around the world. They were protesting gender discrimination and sexual harassment at the company, angered in particular by the disclosure that Andy Rubin, the creator of Android, had received a ninety-million-dollar exit package amid a sexual harassment investigation.
2. James Damore was a Google engineer. In July 2017, he published an internal memo that criticized Google’s diversity policies and claimed that the overrepresentation of men in tech was partly due to innate biological differences that made women less suitable for certain kinds of work. The next month, he was fired.
3. The Cook
1. Tech Workers Coalition is an organization of tech workers that has been active in organizing efforts throughout the industry.
2. On February 21, 2019, Oakland teachers went on strike. The strike lasted for seven days, and forced school officials to make major concessions after more than eighteen months of failed negotiations.
3. While tech companies have long used contractors for blue-collar service roles such as cooks, security guards, and shuttle bus drivers, they increasingly employ contractors for white-collar office roles as well, from programming to testing to recruiting.
4. The Engineer
1. Since a corporate restructuring in 2015, Google’s parent company is called Alphabet, and Google is technically a subsidiary.
2. Perl is a programming language that was once widely used on the web.
3. TVCs are temps, vendors, and contractors. This is Google’s term for its contingent workforce.
4. By late 2015, Google had scanned more than twenty-five million books from more than a hundred countries, in four hundred different languages. According to Google, there are approximately 130 million published books in the world.
5. According to The New York Times, Google employed 121,000 TVCs and 102,000 full-time employees by March 2019.
6. Doxing is the practice of collecting and publishing an individual’s personal information on the internet, typically with malicious intent.
7. 4chan and 8chan are message boards popular with the alt-right, while Stormfront is a long-running neo-Nazi forum.
8. While Google offered a Chinese-language version of its search engine as early as 2000, it didn’t officially launch Google.cn until January 2006. Google.cn provided censored search results, in compliance with Chinese government regulations, until it closed in 2010.
9. Cambridge Analytica was a British consulting firm that worked on political campaigns around the world, including Donald Trump’s presidential bid in 2016. In March 2018, revelations about the extent of the firm’s data-harvesting operations on Facebook caused a major scandal.
10. Dragonfly was a search engine prototype being developed within Google to enable its reentry into the Chinese market. It returned censored search results and recorded users’ searches. In August 2018, The Intercept published a leaked internal memo about Dragonfly, which is how many Googlers discovered the existence of the project. Following the disclosure, workers mounted a campaign to shut down Dragonfly.
11. Baidu dominates the search engine market in China, and is the second-largest search engine in the world after Google.
12. On October 25, 2019, the Pentagon awarded the JEDI contract to Microsoft. Amazon lawyers filed a lawsuit to challenge the move, alleging that President Trump’s personal hostility toward Amazon and its CEO, Jeff Bezos, led him to interfere in the procurement process. In February 2020, a federal judge ordered Microsoft to stop working on JEDI until Amazon’s suit is resolved; the following month, the Pentagon asked the court to let it reconsider aspects of its contract, which was granted. As this book goes to press, the future of JEDI is unclear.
13. In April 2019, two of the organizers of the Google walkout, Claire Stapleton and Meredith Whittaker, went public with claims that they were facing retaliation from management for their role in the action; Stapleton left the company in June 2019, with Whittaker to follow shortly after in July. In November 2019, The New York Times reported that Google had hired a consulting firm that specializes in union busting. The same month, management fired four employees who were active in worker organizing.
5. The Data Scientist
1. Strong AI is the paradigm of trying to model and build human intelligence in a machine. Specific or applied AI, on the other hand, tries to build a method for getting really good at solving a more narrow set of problems.
2. Theranos was a health technology company that promised a new way to collect and test blood samples. After a series of investigations exposed its technology as fraudulent, the company imploded.
3. Cloudera is an enterprise big data company that supports and sells a platform for using Apache Hadoop, an open-source framework for distributed data storage and processing.
4. Spark is a distributed platform for data applications whose main benefit is the ability to process data in memory, which is much faster than applications that must more frequently read data from disk.
5. Carl Benedikt Frey and Michael A. Osborne, “The Future of Employment” (September 17, 2013), https://www.oxfordmartin.ox.ac.uk/downloads/academic/future-of-employment.pdf. Frey and Osborne estimate that 47 percent of total U.S. employment is at risk of computerization. Their claims are controversial, however, and have been challenged from a number of directions.
6. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, the advanced R&D wing of the Department of Defense. Over the decades, the agency has funded the development of many breakthrough technologies,
