The naive optimism of the clueless cultural observer would be hilarious if it weren’t so tediously and predictably inobservant:
After the disastrous launch of their Gemini AI, which insisted that George Washington was actually Black and couldn’t decide whether Musk’s tweets or Hitler was worse, Google’s response was timid and weak. This was just a bug! A problem with QA! It absolutely, positively wasn’t a reflection of corrupted culture at Google, which now appeared to put ideology over accuracy. Really, really!
Anyone watching that shit show would be right to wonder whether one of America’s great technology companies had fallen completely into the hands of the new theocracy. I certainly did.
But now comes evidence that Google perhaps isn’t totally lost, even if an internal war over its origin principles is very much raging. One pitting the mission of organizing the world’s information and making it useful against the newspeak Trust & Safety goal of controlling narratives and countering malinformation (i.e. inconvenient truths).
This played out in stereotype as 28 Googlers occupied the CEO of Google Cloud’s office for 10 hours this week, defaced property, and prevented other Googlers from doing their work. Because Google provides cloud services to Israel, said the occupiers. And thus The Current Thing demanded it be stopped by whatever means possible.
But then the most amazing thing happened. There was no drawn-out investigation. No saccharine statements about employee’s rights to occupy offices, preventing work from happening, or advance their political agenda at work. Nope. They were just fired. Immediately. All 28 of them.
The firings aren’t the result of Google suddenly realizing that it is a business that shouldn’t permit its employees to prioritize politics and ideology over doing their jobs. Nor do they represent a belated rejection of what the author calls “the new theocracy”. It’s simply what happens when those lower in the ranks of the corporate ahrimanocracy offend those who are higher in its ranks.
Remember, evil revels in its own hypocrisy. The more subjective the standard, the more complete its control.