benefits the Chinese military,” even as it snubbed working with the Pentagon. A
couple of days later, President Trump tweeted, “Google is helping China and their
military, but not the U.S. Terrible!”
That spring, many of Google’s efforts to stave off scrutiny seemed to hasten its
arrival. In March, Google announced that it had formed an AI ethics council com-
posed of external advisers. It included Kay Coles James, president of the Heritage
Foundation, who lacked any discernible expertise in artificial intelligence and
who had recently expressed anti-trans and anti-immigrant views. Some employ-
ees were appalled; an internal petition to remove James quickly gained 2,500
signatures. Breitbart and the Daily Caller posted the names of petition organiz-
ers, including Whittaker, and leaked internal messages from a mailing list. One
ethics council member quit in the midst of the uproar. When Google learned
that another member was planning on defecting, the company disbanded the
council—nine days after it launched. To the outside world, it looked as if Google
had capitulated to employee protests. Conservative critics descended. In The
Washington Post, James said Google was not upholding its bargain with the right.
“How can Google now expect conservatives to defend it against anti-business
policies from the left that might threaten its very existence?” she asked.
While Whittaker was helping to lead the charge against the ethics council,
she continued to tussle with management over her job. Stapleton, who had
been told multiple times that she was a “rising leader” in YouTube marketing,
says she was also struggling to hold on to the responsibilities she’d held before
the walkout. When the two women heard that a third organizer had also been
denied a transfer, they posted an open letter on the walkout mailing list on a
Monday in late April, reporting to their coworkers that Google was retaliating
against them. They invited their colleagues to fight back against retaliation
at an employee town hall meeting that Friday, to be livestreamed at Google
offices around the globe.
That week, managers emailed the entire marketing and cloud departments,
denying the women’s claims. On the morning of the town hall, Lorraine Twohill,
the head of marketing at Google, also sent a department-wide email saying
Stapleton’s claims were false. “Over the last several weeks, I have spent a lot of
time talking to everyone involved, trying to understand and empathize with the
situation,” she wrote. Stapleton says Twohill never asked her about the incidents
surrounding her claims of retaliation.
After that, Stapleton saw no future for herself at YouTube. She handed in her
resignation three weeks later. In mid-July, Whittaker resigned too. The next day
Google happened to announce definitively that Project Dragonfly was dead. By
then, none of the major organizers of the protests that had shaken Google over
the past two years were left at the company.
But that didn’t mean things would go back to normal at Google. Over the past
three years, the structures that once allowed executives and internal activists to
hash out tensions had badly eroded. In their place was a new machinery that the
company’s activists on the left had built up, one that skillfully leveraged media
attention and drew on traditional organizing tactics. Dissent was no longer a
family affair. And on the right, meanwhile, the pipeline of leaks running through
Google’s walls was still going as strong as ever.
Late this June, Project Veritas, a right-wing outlet specializing in stings and
exposés, published a slew of leaked documents and snippets of hidden-camera
footage from inside Google. One of the items it posted, as if evidence of Google’s
supposed bias, was a “Beginner’s Guide to Protesting” that Google employees
had drawn up around the time of the travel ban walkout back in 2017. Next to
the document was a message and a link. “Do you work in Big Tech?” it said.
“Project Veritas would love to hear from you.”
Movements that helped
get this issue out:Migrating one of my twins to his own room;
Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind by Yuval
Noah Harari; morning Jazzercise; sobriety, pro-
gressive occultism, and always taking the stairs;
the fourth movement of Beethoven’s Ninth; the
USWNT; the summer of NBA super duos (and
parity!); rafting lower Butte Creek; backflips that
turn into belly flops; “Blucifer”; the rise of oxtail;
the erosion of wedding hashtags; cracking down
on Juul; trying (and failing) to master square
dancing; Dadstagram; the flight of a pygmy
nuthatch; boycotting Amazon Prime Day for
Amazon Strike Day; texts from my East Coast
relatives about the California earthquake I didn’t
feel; the Keanussance; spending 45 minutes
manually inflating a kayak; driving 40 minutes
in the wrong direction for a tasty and cheap
dim sum lunch; biking a mile down Evergreen
Road to check email; TFW you catch a video of
yourself dancing and you look like a jellyfish;
an unwavering quest to make D&D cool again;
dramatic readings of the Mueller report; the
Norwegian woman who runs like a horse.
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NITASHA TIKU (@nitashatiku) is a senior writer at wired. panied by a self-addressed, stamped envelope.