much impossible. Larry Page and Sergey
Brin, the former Montessori kids who
founded Google as Stanford grad students
in the late ’90s, had designed their compa-
ny’s famously open culture to facilitate free
thinking. Employees were “obligated to dis-
sent” if they saw something they disagreed
with, and they were encouraged to “bring
their whole selves” to work rather than
check their politics and personal lives at the
door. And the wild thing about Google was
that so many employees complied. They
weighed in on thousands of online mail-
ing lists, including IndustryInfo, a mega
forum with more than 30,000 members;
Coffee Beans, a forum for discussing diver-
sity; and Poly-Discuss, a list for polyam-
orous Googlers. They posted incessantly on
an employee-only version of Google+ and
on Memegen, an internal tool for creating
and upvoting memes. On Thursdays, Google
would host a company-wide meeting called
TGIF, known for its no-holds-barred Q&As
where employees could, and did, aggres-
sively challenge executives.
All that oversharing and debate was made
possible by another element of Google’s
social contract. Like other corporations,
Google enforces strict policies requiring
employees to keep company business con-
fidential. But for Google employees, non-
disclosure wasn’t just a rule, it was a sacred
bargain—one that earned them candor from
leadership and a safe space to speak freely
about their kinks, grievances, and disagree-
ments on internal forums.
Finally, to a remarkable extent, Google’s
workers really do take “Don’t Be Evil” to
heart. C-suite meetings have been known
to grind to a halt if someone asks, “Wait, is
this evil?” To many employees, it’s axiom-
atic: Facebook is craven, Amazon is aggro,
Apple is secretive, and Microsoft is staid, but
Google genuinely wants to do good.
All of those precepts sent Google’s work-
force into full tilt after the travel ban was
announced. Memegen went flush with
images bearing captions like “We stand
with you” and “We are you.” Jewglers and
HOLA, affinity groups for Jewish and Latinx
employees, quickly pledged their support
for Google’s Muslim group. According to The
Wall Street Journal, members of one mail-
ing list brainstormed whether there might
be ways to “leverage” Google’s search results
to surface ways of helping immigrants; someON A BRIGHT MONDAY
IN JANUARY 2017,
AT 2:30 IN THE AFTERNOON,
ABOUT A THOUSAND
GOOGLE EMPLOYEES—
horrified, alarmed, and a little giddy—began pouring out of the company’s
offices in Mountain View, California. They packed themselves into a cheer-
ful courtyard outside the main campus café, a parklike area dotted with pic-
nic tables and a shade structure that resembles a giant game of pickup sticks.
Many of them held up handmade signs: “Proud Iranian-American Googler,”
“Even Introverts Are Here,” and of course, “Don’t Be Evil!” written in the same
kindergarten colors as the Google logo.
After a few rounds of call-and-response chanting and testimonials from indi-
vidual staffers, someone adjusted the rally’s microphone for the next speaker’s
tall, lanky frame. Sundar Pichai, Google’s soft-spoken CEO of 15 months, stood
in the small clearing in the dense crowd that served as a makeshift stage. “Over
the last 24 to 48 hours, we’ve all been working very hard,” he said, “and every
step of the way I’ve felt the support of 60,000 people behind me.”
It was, to be precise, January 30; Donald Trump’s presidency was 10 days
old. And Executive Order 13769—a federal travel ban on citizens from Iran,
Iraq, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Syria, and Yemen, and a wholesale suspension
of US refugee admissions—had been in effect for 73 hours, trapping hundreds
of travelers in limbo at the nation’s airports. For the moment, the company’s
trademark admonition against evil was being directed at a clear, unmistakably
external target: the White House.
To all the world it looked as if Google—one of the most powerful, pro-
immigrant, and ostensibly progressive corporations in the United States—was
taking a unified stand. But that appearance of unanimity masked a welter of
executive-level indecision and anxiety. It probably would have been more apt
if Pichai had said that, over the previous 48 hours, he had been backed into a
corner by thousands of his employees.
In those first days of the Trump era, Google’s leaders were desperate to
avoid confrontation with the new regime. The company’s history of close ties
to the Obama administration left executives feeling especially vulnerable to
the reactionary movement—incubated partly on Google’s own video plat-
form, YouTube—that had memed, rallied, and voted Trump into office. (It didn’t
help that Eric Schmidt, then executive chairman of Google’s parent company,
Alphabet, had been an adviser to Hillary Clinton’s campaign, or that some 90
percent of political donations by Google employees had gone to Democrats in
2016.) Kent Walker, Google’s risk-averse vice president of public policy, had been
advising staffers not to do anything that might upset Steve Bannon or Breitbart.
So when the travel ban was announced on the afternoon of Friday, January 27,
Google executives initially hoped to “just keep [their] heads down and allow it to
blow over,” according to an employee who was close to those early calculations.
But the tribal dictates of Google’s own workforce made lying low pretty