As the Trump era wore on, Google continued to brace itself for all manner of
external assaults, and not just from the right. The 2016 election and its after-
math set off a backlash against Silicon Valley that seemed to come from all
sides. Lawmakers and the media were waking up to the extractive nature of Big
Tech’s free services. And Google—the company that had casually introduced the
internet to consumer surveillance, orderer of the world’s information, owner of
eight products with more than a billion users each—knew that it would be an
inevitable target.
But in many respects, Google’s most vexing threats during that period came
from inside the company itself. Over the next two and a half years, the company
would find itself in the same position over and over again: a nearly $800 billion
planetary force seemingly powerless against groups of employees—on the left
and the right alike—who could hold the company hostage to its own public image.
In a larger sense, Google found itself and its culture deeply maladapted to a
new set of political, social, and business imperatives. To invent products like
Gmail, Earth, and Translate, you need coddled geniuses free to let their minds
run wild. But to lock down lucrative government contracts or expand into cov-
eted foreign markets, as Google increasingly needed to do, you need to be able
to issue orders and give clients what they want.
For this article, wired spoke with 47 current and former Google employees.
Most of them requested anonymity. Together, they described a period of growing
distrust and disillusionment inside Google that echoed the fury roaring outside
the company’s walls. And in all that time, Google could never quite anticipate
the right incoming collision. After the travel ban walkout, for example, the com-
pany’s leaders expected the worst—and that it would come from Washington.
“I knew we were snowballing toward something,” a former executive says. “I
thought it was going to be Trump calling us out in the press. I didn’t think it was
gonna be some guy writing a memo.”
II.
IN A LOT OF WAYS, GOOGLE’S INTERNAL SOCIAL NETWORKS ARE LIKE A
microcosm of the internet itself. They have their filter bubbles, their trolls, their
edgelords. And contrary to popular perception, those networks are not all pop-
ulated by liberals. Just as the reactionary right was rising on YouTube, it was also
finding ways to amplify itself inside Google’s rationalist culture of debate.
For some time, for instance, one of the moderators of the company’s
Conservatives email list was a Chrome engineer named Kevin Cernekee. Over
the years, Google employees have described Cernekee fairly consistently: as a
shrewd far-right provocateur who made his presence felt across Google’s social
network, trolling both liberals and conservatives.
In August 2015, the giant IndustryInfo mailing list broke into a roiling debate
over why there were so few women in tech. The previous year, Google had
become the first Silicon Valley giant to release data on the demographics of its
workforce—and revealed that 82 percent of its technical workers were male. To
many inside the IndustryInfo thread, the number constituted clear and galling
evidence that Google had to change. When the conversation devolved into a
brawl over the merits of diversity—one that Cernekee joined—a senior vice pres-
ident at Google attempted to shut it down. Cernekee proceeded to bombard the
executive’s Google+ page with posts about his right to critique the pro-diversity
“Social Justice political agenda.” “Can we add a clear statement of banned opin-
ions to the employee handbook,” he wrote, “so that everybody knows what the
ground rules are?” In response, Google HR issued Cernekee a written warning
for “disrespectful, disruptive, disorderly, and insubordinate” comments.
Google also took action against employees on the opposite side of the
debate for their conduct in the same thread; but disciplining Cernekee had
more lasting consequences. In November
2015, Cernekee filed a charge with the
National Labor Relations Board claiming
that Google’s warning constituted retalia-
tion for his political views. He also alleged
that the reprimand interfered with his right
to engage in “protected concerted activ-
ity”—essentially, his right to freely discuss
workplace conditions—as defined under
the National Labor Relations Act.
As Cernekee entered into a years-long
legal battle with Google, he stayed active on
internal channels. In 2016, when members of
a white nationalist group called the Golden
Gate Skinheads clashed with antifa counter-
protesters in a Sacramento park, Cernekee
spoke up for the former on Google’s Free
Speech mailing list. Though he said he was
“the farthest thing possible from a Nazi,”
Cernekee argued that the skinheads “stood
up for free speech and free association.” And
in January 2017, when the prominent white
nationalist Richard Spencer was punched in
the head by a masked protester after Trump’s
inauguration, Cernekee told his fellow list
members that “the battle over free speech
is escalating.” He asked them to donate to
a WeSearchr campaign that was raising a
bounty for anyone who could track down
the identity of the assailant. When mail-
ing list members said that WeSearchr—a
far-right answer to GoFundMe founded by
the agitators Charles C. Johnson and Pax
Dickinson—seemed shady, Cernekee wrote,
“It is completely on the up-and-up. Please
don’t slander my friends. :-(.”
But as conspicuous as Cernekee was
inside Google, he was all but invisible on
the open internet. Consequently, it wasn’t
Cernekee who would become Google’s most
famous heretic. That distinction would fall
to a comparatively reticent Google Search
engineer named James Damore.
In late June 2017, Damore attended a com-
pany event about promoting diversity at
Google, hosted at the Mountain View head-
quarters. There, he claims, he heard orga-
nizers discuss providing extra job interviews
and more welcoming environments for
women and underrepresented minorities.
(Google says it does not provide additional
interviews for people belonging to specific
demographics.) To Damore, this all sounded
like a violation of Google’s meritocratic hiring
process, a finely tuned system built to identify
objectively qualified engineers.