VIII.
ON OCTOBER 25, 2018, A STORY IN THE
New York Times dredged up the dark side
of Google’s tolerance for aberrant geniuses.
In 2013, the paper reported, a woman who
worked for Google had accused Android
cofounder Andy Rubin of coercing her to
perform oral sex in a hotel room. Google, the
story reported, had investigated and found
the claim credible but sent Rubin off with a
$90 million exit package and a fond farewell.
The story didn’t stop at Rubin. Another
high-performing executive, Amit Singhal,
the former head of Google Search, was given
a multimillion-dollar exit package after a
female employee accused him of groping
her at an off-site work event. A third, Richard
DeVaul, allegedly told a female job candidate
that he was in a polyamorous relationship
during her interview and invited her to meet
him at Burning Man, where he asked if he
could give her a massage. Google denied her
the job. DeVaul was still working at Google as
director of X, the company’s experimental
division for ambitious projects.
The Times investigation also noted
Google’s overall “permissive culture,” in
which top executives—including Brin,
Schmidt, and chief legal officer David
Drummond—had relationships with female
employees. Some of the women claimed
they were later pushed out of the company.
Google employees lit up the company’s
internal social networks, once again con-
templating galling facts about the status of
women in Silicon Valley. But this time the
discussion was less easily derailed, per-
haps because some of the most important
exchanges took place on an anonymous
mailing list called Expectant New Moms.
The group’s 4,000 members knew the sto-
ries about Rubin and Singhal—thanks in part
to email threads on the list after each execu-
tive departed. But Rubin’s $90 million payout
felt like a sucker punch. The fact that leaders’
misconduct had been an open secret made it
worse. Why had they given so many years of
their lives to make these men insanely rich?
At 2:05 pm, Claire Stapleton, then a prod-
uct marketing manager at YouTube, fired
off a message to the group: “absolutely dis-
gusting—all of it, all of them. topple the
patriarchy.”
That day Alphabet was already poised to
share some mixed financial news. The com-of four applications of AI that Google would not pursue, including weapons,
technologies that gather and use information “for surveillance violating interna-
tionally accepted norms,” and technology “whose purpose contravenes widely
accepted principles of international law and human rights.”
Two months later, it seemed to many employees that Pichai had already
broken those principles. On August 1, a blockbuster story in the Intercept
reported that Google was planning to launch a new censored search engine in
China. Codenamed Project Dragonfly, the engine would blacklist search terms
like “human rights” and “student protest,” and would produce government-
controlled results for “air quality.” The service would take the form of an app
that Google was prepared to launch in six to nine months. Chinese officials had
already seen a demo, according to the Intercept, though Google still needed
government approval. The app might even help link a person’s search records
to their cell phone, with the information stored on servers in China. (A Google
spokesperson tells wired that, at the time, it was “impossible to confirm or com-
ment on” what the service “might have looked like—it was too early to say.”)
Once again, an employee backlash set in. The Chinese government censor-
ship that had so disturbed Google staffers in 2010 had only grown bolder and
more sophisticated under President Xi Jinping, who was detaining hundreds of
thousands of Uighurs and members of other Muslim minority groups in intern-
ment camps and deploying the latest in surveillance technology on citizens.
The succession of scandals kept deepening the divide between execs and
employee activists. More and more, the latter were questioning the social con-
tract they had lived by. “I went from ‘Oh my god, who leaked that?’ to ‘Oh my
god, management did what?!’” Fong-Jones says. She started to doubt her past
successes with executives. “Perhaps the reason they were willing to listen in the
first place was to give up the things that mattered less to them,” she says.
A couple of weeks after the first Intercept story, Pichai answered some ques-
tions about Dragonfly, which he described as an “exploratory” program. In his
telling, Dragonfly was a project that aligned with Google’s principles, not one that
contravened them. “Our stated mission is to organize the world’s information,”
he said. “China is one-fifth of the world’s population.” Besides, he said, “I genu-
inely do believe we have a positive impact when we engage around the world,
and I don’t see any reason why that would be different in China.”
Brin also spoke at the meeting, claiming he only learned about Dragonfly
because of the “kerfuffle.” (Former executives say this strikes them as implau-
sible.) He also said that “Googlers should feel broadly proud of their work, not
feel that it compromises their principles.” Then the meeting stopped abruptly.
Someone was live-leaking the event to a New York Times reporter. An executive
onstage asked the technicians running the meeting to show everyone what was
happening, and a wall of screens behind Brin flashed a tweet from the reporter
who was posting Brin’s comments in real time.
With the Dragonfly scandal, employees were in some ways the least of
Google’s worries. Washington lawmakers in both parties responded in omi-
nous terms. “It would be very dangerous for Google if they were misrepresenting
to American policymakers the extent of their involvement in China or the ram-
ifications of some of their joint ventures,” US senator Mark Warner, a Democrat
from Virginia, told wired, noting the growing bipartisan concern around China.
Dragonfly left Google particularly vulnerable to criticism from leaders on the
right, who painted the company as un-American. Josh Hawley, now a Republican
senator from Missouri, said Google was motivated more by money than alle-
giance to any country. “If that means violating the privacy of American con-
sumers, they’re happy to do it. If that means going to China and partnering on
technologies that aid a repressive regime, they’re apparently happy to do it.” In
that context, Google’s old slogan no longer applies, Hawley said. “It’s time that
we remove the halo.”