{"id":977,"date":"2026-07-18T10:36:07","date_gmt":"2026-07-18T10:36:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/cityrelocationnews.com\/?p=977"},"modified":"2026-07-18T10:36:07","modified_gmt":"2026-07-18T10:36:07","slug":"the-voice-of-google","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/cityrelocationnews.com\/?p=977","title":{"rendered":"The Voice of Google"},"content":{"rendered":"
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I started working at Google in the summer of 2007, straight out of college, as a \u201cnew-\u00adgrad associate\u201d in the communications department. My first week, I sat with more than a hundred other \u201cNooglers\u201d (new Googlers) at the company\u2019s weekly staff meeting, T.G.I.F., wearing matching company-issued propeller caps as a kind of ritual hazing. The venue was Charlie\u2019s Cafe, a multilevel auditorium in the heart of the \u201cGoogleplex,\u201d the company\u2019s sprawling campus in Mountain View, California. The event felt less like a corporate meeting than like a weekly revival\u2014part stand\u00adup set, part science fair, part sermon, all of it fuelled by keg beer.<\/p>\n

Read more How Worldy Is the World Cup?<\/a><\/p>\n

Google\u2019s founders, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, were bona-fide public figures by then, and self-\u00admade billionaires multiple times over, but in Charlie\u2019s they were idols. They would often ascend the stage together, practically matching in sweat-wicking athletic clothes and Crocs. Larry had a dopey perma-smile, and seemed delighted by everything, especially Sergey. Sergey was the straight man, with a faint lilt, a product of his childhood in Russia, and an acrobatic build that made him look like he might launch into a handspring at any moment. Their charisma was unconventional, contextual; you had to be there. The audience of employees lapped up every word, giggled at every dad joke. During a Q.\u00a0&\u00a0A. portion of the proceedings, even adversarial questions were absorbed into the Google spirit\u2014\u00adit all melted into laughs, love. Merriam-\u00adWebster had added \u201cgoogle\u201d to the dictionary the year before. Fortune<\/em> had crowned it the \u201cBest Company to Work For\u201d in America. Profits were, as the execs loved to boast, \u201cup and to the right,\u201d fuelled by an online-advertising machine that minted cash beyond Wall Street\u2019s wildest dreams. But the company\u2019s financial success felt almost incidental. What mattered, we told ourselves, was the mission\u2014a conviction that technology could improve the world and that we were helping to build the future. The air in Charlie\u2019s buzzed with collective belief.<\/p>\n

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That first meeting was the only one I\u2019d ever attend as a pure spectator. By week two, I was working the event\u2014\u00adcordoning off the Noogler section, handing out extra caps\u2014and I soon began helping to draft bits of Larry and Sergey\u2019s script. A portion of my time was spent supporting the P.R. team, and I started to pick up my first press requests, providing office tours to journalists eager to see the \u201cGoogle experience\u201d firsthand. I studied a \u201cmaster workplace talking points\u201d document, which was maintained with input from PeopleOps, which was Google-speak for human resources. This was the era of \u201cbringing your whole self to work,\u201d of shiny, smiling H.R. people doing press hits about the importance of valuing employees\u2019 authentic personhood (always with a telling corollary: \u201cBecause that\u2019s how people do their best work!\u201d). I was required to attend a training on \u201cconscious business\u201d with a guy named Fred Kofman, an executive coach whom Sheryl Sandberg credited with shaping her \u201clean-in\u201d ethos. The course was, theoretically, about living one\u2019s courageous values, but its most salient lesson was that employees should take \u201cunconditional accountability\u201d\u2014which, in practice, sounded a lot like never questioning the higher-ups. The message reiterated over and over was that there were two kinds of people in the world: victims and players. You wanted to be a player at all times.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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Despite the lore, Google\u2019s offices didn\u2019t make a big first impression. The bulk of the campus had been quickly converted after its previous occupant went down in the fallout from the dot-\u00adcom bust. The result was a complex of squat, one-\u00ad or two-level buildings with metal and glass siding, surrounded by a moat of parking spaces, with Google signs plunked into the dirt out front. But there were plenty of amenities to point out\u2014\u00adthe massage rooms and nap pods, the dinosaur fossil, the wacky sensory-\u00adbreak touches like ball pits, swings, and yoga balls (even if no one actually seemed to use them). Foreign journalists seemed more skeptical than their American counterparts of perks such as lunch-\u00adbreak haircuts or on-site laundry rooms, which I\u2019d heard described as letting Google be your \u201chousewife.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cZ is is all a big plot to control ze workers, no?\u201d a French reporter said.<\/p>\n

At that point, though, I was still learning to see Google through Google\u2019s eyes. I learned to deflect these kinds of questions and pitied the askers, a little bit, for their cynicism.<\/p>\n

Over the following years, Google began broadcasting T.G.I.F. meetings to far-flung buildings across the Mountain View campus, and to an ever-growing constellation of satellite offices across the U.S. and around the world. Each week, we prepared a \u201cprebrief\u201d for Larry, Sergey, and the rest of the executive team, listing hot topics at the company that might come up during the Q. & A., and suggested talking points. I\u2019d trawl internal e-mail lists to see what issues were getting Googlers riled up that week\u2014Maps redesigns, Gmail-spam hiccups, price-hikes at the company\u2019s on-site day care, management\u2019s attempt to engineer healthy eating by moving the M&M jars. If an issue was really controversial, it might spawn a \u201ccentrithread,\u201d with at least a hundred replies. My work became not just watching the Zeitgeist within the company but learning how to contain it\u2014\u00adreading through messages, distilling the emotional temperature, and crafting executive responses meant to absorb shock and restore calm.<\/p>\n

No one else seemed eager to send out a weekly \u201cHere\u2019s how to tune in to TGIF\u201d e-mail, so I volunteered to do it. I kept the notes straight at first, but soon began injecting more voice, writing things like \u201cAs the week folds gently in on itself and we collectively blink at the passage of time, we arrive\u2014inevitably, beautifully\u2014at TGIF. Also: beer.\u201d The messages were casual, sly, a little irreverent\u2014\u00adproof that Google wasn\u2019t like any other company\u2014while always amplifying the corporate mythology. I wrote about whatever products and feature updates we\u2019d be spotlighting onstage that week as \u201cepistemological experiments\u201d and \u201cpeak experiences\u201d in the pursuit of \u201cMeaning and Truth,\u201d and cast the executives appearing alongside Larry and Sergey as visionaries, prophets, and sages. T.G.I.F. was the weekly pageant in which the company talked to itself, but my e-mails became an important companion piece: folklore and fan fiction, the refrains of the gospel. Employees began to look forward to them. Every week, the moment the T.G.I.F. e-mail went out, an internal forum called Memegen exploded with reactions to what I\u2019d written. One meme was captioned, \u201cI want whatever Claire Stapleton\u2019s on when she\u2019s writing the TGIF emails.\u201d Another christened me the Bard of Google. At Charlie\u2019s, a group of engineers presented me with a wooden plaque naming me the company\u2019s poet laureate. When I was promoted to manager, my performance review credited my \u201ccult following.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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This voice-of-Google thing\u2014\u00ada code I\u2019d cracked for generating corpspeak with personality\u2014\u00adslowly became a hot commodity. The company relied heavily on the rhetoric of \u201cculture\u201d to keep tens of thousands of workers energized, giving a hundred and ten per cent. If work was going to be like a family, then it had to sound like one\u2014maximally friendly, quirky, virtuous, Googley<\/em>. So, in early 2011, when Larry Page became the C.E.O., replacing the veteran tech executive Eric Schmidt, I was looped in to help craft Larry\u2019s internal messaging.<\/p>\n

Eric had pontificated plenty, but Larry was the epitome of techno-\u00adoptimism: Google wasn\u2019t just going to organize the world\u2019s information, he maintained; it was going to solve humanity\u2019s biggest problems. In 2013, he launched Calico, a health-care company focussed on extending the human life span, and Time<\/em> magazine ran a cover story with the headline \u201cCan Google Solve Death?\u201d \u201cWe need moon shots,\u201d Larry would say, big, world-\u00adchanging ideas and initiatives, to make employees excited about innovating again. (Curing cancer wasn\u2019t necessarily a moon shot, he once suggested, since it would only extend the average human life span by about three years.) His aphorisms stacked up like motivational posters in a middle-school science classroom\u2014\u201cHave a healthy disregard for the impossible,\u201d \u201cIf you\u2019re not doing some things that are crazy, then you\u2019re doing the wrong things\u201d\u2014but Larry seemed to experience them all as fresh revelations, and he expected them to invigorate the workforce in turn. He loved to tell a story about how he\u2019d read an autobiography of Nikola Tesla when he was around twelve, and cried\u2014\u00adhe really emphasized the crying bit\u2014\u00adbecause Tesla died poor. (This, I guess, taught him the all-\u00adimportant life lesson \u201cCommercialize those inventions.\u201d) \u201cComputers should do the hard work,\u201d Larry would repeat, so humans can get back to doing what humans do best: learning, living, and loving.<\/p>\n

Larry reorganized the company around a handful of key priorities, the biggest being that every product at Google should become \u201csocial.\u201d He tied twenty-five per cent of employees\u2019 annual bonuses to the company\u2019s success in pushing this agenda. Hundreds of handpicked engineers, a clear first-\u00adclass citizenry, were moved into a secretive, newly renovated building in Mountain View. A lush living wall, said to boost brainpower and creativity, reinforced the sense that the workplace itself had been engineered to optimize human potential. Meanwhile, Larry\u2019s examples of how to implement his vision were utterly banal. The centerpiece of his plan was a new social-media network, code-named Emerald Sea, that would eventually launch as Google+. It was a defensive move, not an inspiring vision\u2014\u00adGoogle worried that newer upstarts, like Facebook and Twitter, would steal our enormous internet lunch and become everyone\u2019s portal to the web. Google+ was supposed to help us really \u201cknow\u201d our users, which, in turn, would help us better target them with advertising. It wouldn\u2019t be long before, say, Google Maps could serve you up a coupon right when you walked into your local CVS. This was groundbreaking stuff\u2014a vision that ceding all of one\u2019s personal data to Google would really feel worth it. The stock price went up and up and up.<\/p>\n

There were signs that Google was becoming bloated and inefficient, with multiple teams, for example, working on smartwatches simultaneously, as Googlers pointed out at one T.G.I.F. (In the end, none of these attempts could best the Apple Watch.) Larry said, blithely, that chasing the competition was a death knell, and yet that seemed to be all that we were doing. \u201cWe need to put more wood behind fewer arrows,\u201d he often said, regurgitating an old Valley maxim. The trouble was, the arrows kept multiplying\u2014appearing from nowhere, whizzing in every direction\u2014and even Larry couldn\u2019t seem to contain them.<\/p>\n

Google+ was a short-lived flop, but the spin was relentless. The platform had hit ten million users just two weeks after an invitation-\u00adonly launch, Larry boasted. By the fall, the number was forty million, and by early 2012 more than twice that. What Larry didn\u2019t say was that many of those \u201cusers\u201d had been been virtually forced to create accounts when they signed up for other Google services. The engagement numbers were dismal. When the platform was sunsetted, in 2018, Google admitted that the average Google+ user spent less than five seconds on the platform per visit. The place was a graveyard of auto-\u00adpopulated profiles, a digital Potemkin village.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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In the crusade to make everything social, Google ended up destroying one of the few genuinely social things it had ever made: the RSS-feed aggregator Google Reader. Reader wasn\u2019t glamorous, but it had a passionate following. It was small, by Google standards (and only by Google standards), with a reported thirty million or so users, many of whom were active daily. It was, by far, my favorite Google product, the one place I actually \u201csocialized\u201d online; I used it every day to read stuff on the web, share links, commiserate with friends. I saw a Googler on Hacker News<\/em> say that the killing of Reader was the \u201cElves leave Middle-Earth\u201d moment. Memegen was flooded with snark: We can bankroll a delusional moon shot to beam internet from balloons (Project Loon), but we can\u2019t keep a few engineers on this?<\/p>\n

My own growing skepticism started to bleed into my T.G.I.F. e-mails. The messages started coming out half liturgy, half parody, depending on how you looked at it:<\/p>\n

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If an alien walked into an art museum, wouldn\u2019t it think the abstract paintings were done first, thousands of years before the Renaissance?\u00a0.\u00a0.\u00a0. step right up for a Lacanian mirror-\u00adphase-y TGIF, where everyone comes together to blink furiously at the reflection and chant: \u201cThis is what Google looks like.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Rumors of relationships between executives and underlings went around on campus. One of my first summers, on the Marina shuttle line, I heard about an employee who was visibly pregnant. She\u2019d slept with one of the big sales executives and she was super-religious, it was said; she grew more and more pregnant, then disappeared. I asked around to see whether anyone knew what had happened to her\u2014crickets. At a work event in New York, for a short-lived visual search engine that Google was trying to build in the \u201cfashion space,\u201d an executive I\u2019d been ghostwriting for suddenly asked me, apropos of nothing, \u201cHave you heard any rumors about me?\u201d \u201cSure,\u201d I replied. I\u2019d heard some rumors about him having dalliances on the sales team when he\u2019d worked in the London office. \u201cI challenge you to come up with one name,\u201d he said. We were up against the bar of the venue, and he gripped me around the waist with one hand. I could feel all five fingers clasping me, and I withered. Even as his hand seemed to confirm everything I\u2019d heard, I lost my grip on the gossip, suddenly unable to imagine naming names or defending what I\u2019d said. \u201cLet me get you a drink,\u201d he said. It was a command, not a question, so I whispered, \u201cVodka soda.\u201d When someone else finally walked over (Bless you, networking stranger!<\/em>) I slipped away and sprinted out the door.<\/p>\n

There were other ways that the company\u2019s power structures, and my own precarious place within them, began to come into focus. In the summer of 2012, I transferred to work at Creative Lab, a coveted New York-based studio that produced some of Google\u2019s major ads. My boss there, Kevin, dressed like a little kid\u2014\u00adT-shirt, cargo shorts, low-\u00adtop sneakers\u2014\u00ad<\/strong>and had a boyish crew cut to match. The only tipoffs that he was pushing forty were a sallow, hangdog facial expression and Nosferatu-\u00adesque under-eye bags. He used the word \u201cshit\u201d a lot: We just make shit. We do epic shit.<\/em> During our first and only meeting before I was hired, he barely discussed me, my work, or how he envisioned that I might fit into the Lab, though he did say, with a perceptible note of admiration, \u201cYou clearly get the Googley shit.\u201d I was an emissary from, or maybe a totem of, Mountain View, and that gave me some currency. But once I was in the job he didn\u2019t bother to train me. \u201cJust read up on the Lab and watch all the videos again,\u201d he said. He\u2019d find something for me to do eventually.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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A cocky freelancer, a buddy of Kevin\u2019s from another agency, started soon after I did and was immediately handed important projects. He effortlessly cracked Kevin\u2019s shell, bringing out a goofy, relaxed side of him I\u2019d never once seen. The two laughed and joked constantly, and lip-\u00adsynched to the song of the year, Carly Rae Jepsen\u2019s \u201cCall Me Maybe,\u201d as an afternoon energy boost. I remember running into him, a month into the job, in the snack kitchen, and him remarking, \u201cOh, I forgot you existed,\u201d before shuffling off to his next meeting. When I asked a co-worker for advice about how to persuade Kevin to \u201cput me in the game,\u201d he shrugged and said that Kevin was a \u201cguy\u2019s guy,\u201d who liked working with the kind of dude he could get a beer with after work.<\/p>\n

The bulk of the creatives at the Lab were men. There were plenty of women, but they were mostly slotted into supporting roles\u2014\u00admanaging budgets, spreadsheets, and schedules, making the machine run. A female exec, the head of production, left soon after I arrived, and there wasn\u2019t a single female creative director the entire time I was there. A top executive was asked about this once in an all-\u00adhands meeting. He offered some vague lip service about how the Lab was such a \u00adunicorn-\u00admagic kind of place that they needed to be \u201cextra sure\u201d that anyone they hired\u2014\u00adread: any woman\u2014\u00adwould be set up to succeed. This was framed as sage judgment, and we dutifully nodded along. Who could argue with the logic of meritocracy? I was close to quitting when I saw an e-mail from a Google internal recruiter: YouTube, now owned by Google, was having trouble filling a position on the marketing team, and they thought I\u2019d be a great fit.<\/p>\n

My title at YouTube was \u201ccuration strategy manager,\u201d but YouTube was not a curated place. It was wild, endless, untamable. In earlier eras, the site had more \u201chome page editorial,\u201d dedicated sections in which editors chose interesting things to spotlight. But YouTube had long since learned that algorithms could do a better job picking videos to squeeze the longest \u201ctotal watch time\u201d out of every user. As best as I could understand it, we curator-managers were there to add a human component to the algorithm, helping to shape it with our insights about what made for good content. Our team had a shared project with Engineering, basically an infinite computer-\u00adgenerated playlist. The machine trawled the site, surfacing the most popular content and filtering out anything risqu\u00e9, and then we topped up the offerings with whatever might have been missed. My boss, another Kevin, directed me away from YouTube, to Twitter, Reddit, and Digg, to see which YouTube videos were popping up that day. The exercise was largely fruitless: it was genuinely hard to find things that the machine hadn\u2019t caught.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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Kevin had given a TED<\/em> Talk called \u201cWhy Videos Go Viral\u201d that garnered a lot of attention from YouTube management, and he was settling into a regular gig as a company spokesman. He was a deft summarizer of internet memes and phenomena: \u201cGangnam Style,\u201d Keyboard Cat, \u201cCharlie bit my finger\u201d\u2014YouTube\u2019s oldest, least controversial hits. He was dimpled and telegenic, with a confident, know-\u00adit-\u00adall way of talking about internet trends. He said that he\u2019d invented the genre of the political supercut video, a claim both difficult to verify and completely on-\u00adbrand. In media appearances, his main talking point was \u201cYouTube is changing the world\u201d; he was writing a book proposal about it. He built this narrative by stringing together crazy outlier examples: Justin Bieber getting discovered after his mom started uploading videos of him singing; a guy in Africa who taught himself the javelin from YouTube videos, and later won an Olympic medal.<\/p>\n

But the platform\u2019s dark underbelly was becoming hard to ignore. One of the first \u201ctrends\u201d Kevin briefed me on was dubbed Elsagate: a sprawling ecosystem of videos featuring beloved children\u2019s characters in bizarre and profane scenarios\u2014knockoff Paw Patrol dogs committing suicide, Peppa Pig having her teeth pulled out one by one by a sadistic dentist, Elsa giving birth. Disturbing enough on their own, many had also been labelled by YouTube\u2019s recommendation systems as appropriate for young children. The company tried cracking down on the videos, but the problems felt too vast, too deeply woven into the platform itself, to imagine that they could really be fixed. Our editorial team was told to avoid spotlighting \u201cFrozen\u201d trends for a while, and otherwise to carry on. One day, my counterpart in London Gchatted me a link to an essay by the anthropologist David Graeber, called \u201cOn the Phenomenon of Bullshit Jobs,\u201d about the rise of pointless office work in late capitalism. I read it twice at my desk, open-\u00admouthed. \u201cHuge swathes of people .\u00a0.\u00a0.\u00a0spend their entire working lives performing tasks they secretly believe do not really need to be performed,\u201d Graeber wrote. My co-worker said, \u201cBit nail-on-the-head, innit?\u201d<\/p>\n

Social media was emerging as a major discipline within marketing, a development that the executives of the company didn\u2019t really understand but which they knew was crucial to the \u201cYouTube generation.\u201d In 2015, YouTube\u2019s social-media manager left abruptly to launch a career as an L.G.B.T.Q.+\/mental-health activist\/influencer (a very 2015 career pivot), and I was offered the job. At that time, YouTube\u2019s social-media presence consisted of a handful of Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook posts a day, written and deployed by an agency, at arm\u2019s length. My new boss, a British woman named Marion, stressed to me, during our first lunch, that there was a lot of opportunity to expand our reach, because \u201cYouTube is the biggest brand in the world on social.\u201d I would hear Marion say that YouTube was the biggest brand in the world on social at least a thousand times in the next five years. It was technically true: Twitter had long recommended YouTube\u2019s account to new users during sign-up, and so the platform\u2019s profile had amassed tens of millions of followers, placing it up there with the pages of Taylor Swift and Barack Obama.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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Marion asked me to take the lead on writing a \u201cmegadeck\u201d about our strategy and socializing it (pun, unfortunately, intended) within the org. It was hard to pinpoint a tangible return-on-investment in social media: \u00addespite our fifty or so million followers on Twitter, tweets drove negligible traffic back to YouTube; platforms like Instagram drove no traffic at all, and much of our engagement was from spammers or bots. But the marketing jargon flowed from me with ease. We were the voice of the brand, I wrote, \u201cdriving love and building trust with our community\u201d and \u201cshaping the daily conversation around YouTube.\u201d When it was time to come up with a single mission statement for our work, I channelled the loftiness of Creative Lab and Larry Page, my whole career building up to this moment: \u201cWe remind the world what it loves about YouTube.\u201d Marion thought it was brilliant.<\/p>\n

I was promoted right afterward, and I started to ghostwrite the tweets of the latest C.E.O., a longtime Googler named Susan Wojcicki. Her voice was earnest and corporate, a mom enthusiastic about YouTube creators and new product features. But the controversies in which YouTube was implicated were multiplying. It was the year leading up to Trump\u2019s 2016 election, and tech companies were being scrutinized for their part in polarizing public discourse. YouTube had played a role in Gamergate, an online harassment campaign against prominent women in the gaming world that became a culture-wars flashpoint. (Steve Bannon later described Gamergate as a useful way to recruit disaffected young men into Trump\u2019s campaign.) Hard-\u00adright channels had always existed on the platform, but now they were growing bigger, becoming mainstream, pushing the boundaries of what kinds of talk were acceptable. How much was YouTube supposed to police its content? Management didn\u2019t seem to be able to decide.<\/p>\n

Read more Trump\u2019s Election-Fraud Bait and Switch<\/a><\/p>\n

In the summer of 2016, I was put in charge of coming up with a big-\u00adbudget get-out-the-vote campaign for the Presidential election. No one said outright that we hoped to tip the scales against Trump, but it was understood that YouTube could help the Democrats by boosting youth turnout. We called the campaign #VoteIRL, and we tapped tons of the platform\u2019s biggest stars to encourage their audiences to register to vote. Even President Obama made a #VoteIRL video, lending the campaign an aura of official civic endorsement. Hillary Clinton lost, of course, but internally our campaign was deemed a success. The higher-ups gave me a big bonus and an internal award. Breitbart got hold of leaked footage from a T.G.I.F. meeting during which Larry and Sergey openly expressed their dismay over Trump\u2019s victory: \u201cMyself as an immigrant and a refugee, I certainly find this election deeply offensive, and I know many of you do, too,\u201d Sergey said. Googlers peppered the executives with anxious questions about whether products like YouTube were reinforcing warped beliefs and making the country more divided.<\/p>\n

YouTube had become a mirror, reflecting and amplifying the turmoil of the time. Its biggest star, a Swedish gamer named PewDiePie, was an anti-P.C. provocateur who made rape jokes (even putting out a music video literally called \u201cIt\u2019s Raping Time\u201d) and tossed around \u201cgay,\u201d \u201cretard,\u201d and \u201cautistic\u201d as playful insults during gaming playthroughs. His \u201cedgy\u201d humor only fuelled his popularity: for nearly six years, his was the most-\u00adsubscribed-to channel on the platform. But, in 2017, he pushed things further, releasing a video in which he paid two South Asian men on a gig marketplace to hold up a sign that read \u201cDeath to all Jews.\u201d In another video posted to PewDiePie\u2019s channel, a guy dressed as Jesus declared, \u201cHitler did absolutely nothing wrong!\u201d Soon YouTube was facing an \u201cadpocalypse,\u201d as brands including PepsiCo, Johnson & Johnson, and A.T. & T. realized that their commercials were appearing on the platform alongside extremism and hate speech. The company scrambled to placate the brands with new demonetization policies, stripping ads from huge batches of videos. This, in turn, slashed creator revenues and sent independent creators\u2014\u00adthe emotional lifeblood of the platform\u2014\u00adinto uproar.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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The social-media team\u2019s supposed grip on the public narrative about the brand had always been tenuous. YouTube was too big, too volatile, too gravitational; it pulled in billions of eyeballs a day, no matter how we managed the optics. Our whole mandate\u2014\u00adshape the daily conversation, boost brand love, remind the world why it loves us\u2014\u00adnow felt almost delusional.<\/p>\n

In July 2017, while I was out on maternity leave after the birth of my first son, a twenty-eight-year-old software engineer named James Damore posted a ten-\u00adpage memo, titled \u201cGoogle\u2019s Ideological Echo Chamber,\u201d to an internal forum called \u00adskeptics@google.com. In it, citing a range of psychological studies and Wiki pages, he argued that women are underrepresented in the tech industry not because of systemic inequity but because of their innate biological differences from men\u2014\u00adtheir \u201cstronger interest in people rather than things,\u201d their propensity for \u201cneuroticism,\u201d their \u201chigher levels of anxiety.\u201d He criticized the company\u2019s diversity initiatives as discriminatory and futile, and advanced \u201cconcrete suggestions\u201d for improving them: \u201cde-\u00admoralize diversity,\u201d \u201cde-\u00ademphasize empathy,\u201d \u201cstop alienating Conservatives.\u201d Empathy is dangerous, he said: \u201cBeing emotionally unengaged helps us better reason about the facts.\u201d The memo created a firestorm within Google, and Damore was soon terminated. The alt-right immediately held him up as a hero, and he did interviews with stars of the nascent \u201cmanosphere\u201d such as Joe Rogan and Jordan Peterson. (He later sued Google, though he eventually dismissed the claim, and he now reportedly lives in a castle in Luxembourg.)<\/p>\n

A few months later the Harvey Weinstein story broke, and #MeToo stories flooded social media. But there were foreshocks already, especially in the tech industry. A woman named Susan Fowler had gone viral earlier that year with a post detailing a culture of harassment and discrimination at Uber, and the Times<\/em> had published a story about female entrepreneurs being propositioned by investors during the funding or recruiting process. Then, in October, 2018, the paper published a bombshell report on Google\u2019s handling of sexual-misconduct allegations against Andy Rubin, the Android founder turned Google executive. Google had found one of the claims credible, the Times<\/em> said, but instead of kicking Rubin out they\u2019d quietly negotiated a ninety-million-dollar exit package. (Rubin denied misconduct and claimed that he\u2019d left of his own accord.) The piece named another executive who\u2019d received similar treatment after a sexual-misconduct allegation against him was found credible, and reported on other cases of male higher-ups having relationships with employees or job applicants, including one consensual affair that led to the woman being pushed out while the man remained at the company, accruing hundreds of millions of dollars in equity.<\/p>\n

As soon as the story broke, I checked the online discussion groups to see what Google staffers were saying. An anonymous, super-active mom group that I followed was usually full of practical, nerdy engineers crunching data on their kids\u2019 eating and sleeping patterns, or synthesizing the latest studies about boosting baby brains. But the Rubin story unearthed something new. A mom started a thread to discuss the revelations, and women began sharing stories about what they\u2019d witnessed or endured working in the boys\u2019 club of Big Tech. One recounted a tragicomic anecdote from a T.G.I.F. meeting on International Women\u2019s Day, when a Googler had asked Larry and Sergey to name some of their personal female heroes. Larry apparently chose Ruth Porat, the C.F.O., who was with him onstage; Sergey struggled to come up with anyone until Larry helped him land on Gloria Steinem.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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At the next T.G.I.F., Larry apologized for the \u201cpainful\u201d Rubin story and spoke vaguely about how he would have made different decisions in hindsight, but he refused to address the payout directly. Sundar Pichai, who\u2019d succeeded Larry as C.E.O., said \u201cwe want to get better,\u201d and the head of H.R., Eileen Naughton, said that the company had made improvements to its policies. Then the meeting moved on to address normal product updates. \u201cWeak ass TGIF response,\u201d someone in the mom group wrote. Someone else said: \u201cAnyone else feeling *personally* humiliated to be spending their limited hours on this planet to enrich men like this?\u201d This wasn\u2019t how Googlers talked. We\u2019d been conditioned to be optimistic and trusting of leadership. Grateful. Always players, never victims. Another woman in the thread said she was going to write an e-mail to Sundar. Several more chimed in that they would, too.<\/p>\n

I knew, from my time in the communications department, that this wasn\u2019t enough. Individual complaints were too easy to metabolize, to redirect into the bureaucracy. So I wrote back: \u201cWe\u2019re at a deep pivot moment where MeToo, the backlash against tech\u2019s money\/power, and just general societal unrest collide.\u00a0.\u00a0.\u00a0. I wonder how we can use our collective leverage.\u00a0.\u00a0.\u00a0. If we banded together, what could we do? A walkout, a strike, an open letter to Sundar?\u201d<\/p>\n

That night, a member of the group posted on Memegen, the internal forum where commentary on my T.G.I.F. e-mails had once appeared: How about a walkout to stand against toxic workplace culture? Maybe a hundred people reacted with a \u201c+1,\u201d and women in the mom group were talking about it. I quickly created a new Google group to discuss the idea. We made our first decision almost immediately: the walkout would be Thursday, November 1st\u2014just five days away. A project manager named Tanuja reached out and offered to help. We met in a conference room in my building; she was hyper-organized, fired up, ready to project-\u00admanage the hell out of this. In forty-\u00adfive minutes, we outlined a rough plan and built an internal site: a \u201chub and spoke\u201d model, with local leads in every participating office, customizing the day with their own stories and flair.<\/p>\n

Late on Monday, BuzzFeed<\/em> broke the news that women at Google were planning a walkout. We got another big P.R. boost from the company itself, when Sundar sent an e-mail that night. \u201cSome of you have raised very constructive ideas for how we can improve our policies and our processes going forward\u00a0.\u00a0.\u00a0. I\u2019m taking in all of your feedback so we can turn these ideas into action.\u201d H.R. would make managers aware of the event we\u2019d planned, he said, and insure that we had the support we needed. It was classic P.R. jujitsu\u2014\u00adabsorbing the language of dissent to neutralize it.<\/p>\n

I used every skill I\u2019d honed over a decade of managing Google\u2019s optics: drafting comms, co\u00f6rdinating with press, coaching speakers behind the scenes. The Times<\/em> described how \u201cGoogle was struggling to contain a growing internal backlash.\u201d New York<\/em> ran a piece co-signed by our core team: \u201cWe\u2019re the Organizers of the Google Walkout. Here Are Our Demands.\u201d Hundreds of people had left comments and edits in a shared Google Doc, and we\u2019d whittled them down to five points, including a commitment to end pay inequity and an improved process for reporting sexual misconduct.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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By sunrise, it was clear that the walkout was going to be huge. It took place at 11:10 A.M.<\/em> local time in every location. In Dublin, London, Zurich, Tokyo, and Hamburg, people streamed from the offices, and the press was everywhere. The event started trending on Twitter. At YouTube, we were always trying to manufacture moments like this\u2014with sprawling brand campaigns, enormous budgets, and a labyrinth of agencies all straining to make something trend, break through, go viral. We almost never pulled it off. And now here it was, unfolding organically.<\/p>\n

The possibility of retaliation from Google was a frequent topic of discussion among the walkout\u2019s organizing group. The Tech Workers Coalition, a new industry advocacy group, had launched a hotline for Googlers, and legal nonprofits had reached out to offer their support and services. But the walkout took place at a strange, fleeting moment when corporations like Google wanted to align themselves with the #resistance. Even Porat, Google\u2019s top-ranking woman, had participated in the protest, and when asked about it a couple of weeks later, at a Wall Street Journal<\/em> conference, she framed it as emblematic of a culture that welcomed employees using their voices to \u201cpercolate up\u201d issues. \u201cWe had Googlers do what Googlers do well,\u201d she said. \u201cIf you can get cars to self-\u00addrive, and if you can solve all the problems that we\u2019re solving through technology, why can\u2019t we solve this?\u201d A few weeks after the walkout, during an off-site retreat for YouTube\u2019s social-media team, Marion, my boss, asked me to give a presentation sharing my \u201clearnings\u201d from co\u00f6rdinating the action. Afterward, she nudged a deputy, who reached under the table and furnished a pair of white Doc Martens. \u201cWe wanted to give you something to commemorate your activism,\u201d Marion said.<\/p>\n

The moment of institutional self-congratulation was brief. In January, news broke that a flank of shareholders was suing the board of Alphabet, Google\u2019s parent company, over the handling of the Rubin affair. The lawsuit, which Alphabet later settled, attacked the board on both ethical and fiduciary grounds, saying that its \u201cculture of concealment\u201d was harming the company and that the actions it had taken so far, post-\u00adwalkout, were \u201creactive\u201d and \u201cinsufficient.\u201d The suit also surfaced some juicy new tidbits, chiefly that Larry Page had personally approved a hundred-and-fifty-million-dollar stock grant for Rubin while the sexual-harassment investigation was under way, \u00adand that another exec had received an exit payout as large as forty-five million dollars. That day, some of the core walkout group hammered out a statement: \u201cAnyone who enables abuse, harassment and discrimination must be held accountable, and those with the most power have the most to account for.\u201d The Times<\/em> ran an excerpt of it with their story about the suit. It was published just before I logged on to a one-on-one meeting with Marion.<\/p>\n

Marion was based in the Bay Area, in the San Bruno offices, but she\u2019d been in London visiting family for the holidays. Appearing onscreen, her face close to the computer, and the background all fuzzy, she told me that she\u2019d had a think over the break, and that she\u2019d decided to reorganize the team. A member who had reported to me would now become my peer and take over \u201cdaily social,\u201d the stream of content that had been my core responsibility. Marion was also hiring a new lead above me, meaning that I would no longer report directly to her. In short, my job was being gutted overnight. I ended the call as quickly as I could, too stunned to respond.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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The next day, I wrote to Marion making the case for keeping my role as it was. She replied quickly, stating that the reorganization would go ahead regardless, so I decided to reach out to our department\u2019s H.R. person. She told me that she couldn\u2019t help, because the marketing department had recently switched to a new human-resources model, and H.R. staff members like her now served only directors. If employees lower down in the hierarchy had an issue, we\u2019d have to file a ticket on an internal network, and someone would be assigned from a centralized H.R. hub to manage it.<\/p>\n

I went ahead and filed a ticket, mostly out of curiosity about how this automated system would process a serious claim. In a \u201cPlease describe your issue\u201d box (two hundred and fifty characters allotted), I wrote that I\u2019d organized the Google walkout and now my boss was demoting me out of nowhere, which seemed like textbook retaliation for labor organizing. It took a couple of days for anyone to respond, and a few more before I met, over video, with a young H.R. representative. I told him my story, and he worked methodically through a script of generic solutions. If I was having challenges with my manager, I should consider inviting her out for coffee or an activity\u2014some quality time outside the office to rebuild the relationship. I could take advantage of the company\u2019s internal mindfulness and self-care resources, or take some P.T.O. to relax, because working at Google could be pretty demanding!<\/p>\n

As coverage of the walkout continued, more stories about Google\u2019s culture began to surface. I spoke to New York<\/em> about my experience at Creative Lab, and, not long afterward, Lorraine Twohill, Google\u2019s chief marketing officer\u2014my boss\u2019s boss\u2019s boss\u2019s boss\u2014reached out. She offered to connect me with a senior H.R. rep named Suzanne, who, in turn, referred me to someone named Julie on the benefits team. By that point I was considering taking time off, to figure out a next step\u2014a transfer to a different team in marketing, perhaps, or to a different org within Alphabet\u2014but I was surprised when Julie clicked through slides explaining medical leave. Why was I being treated as a sick person? I had cried in the meeting with Suzanne, explaining how crushed I\u2019d felt by the retaliation, but the company\u2019s narrative seemed to be that I was having a mental breakdown.<\/p>\n

The next day, when Suzanne followed up to ask whether I\u2019d considered the options she\u2019d suggested, I told her that I was seeking outside counsel. I\u2019d been in touch with a labor lawyer, and we began drafting a demand letter. Before we could send it, Marion\u2019s boss called me and said that I could keep my responsibilities after all. On paper, my job was restored. I still ran the social-media accounts, my little team, a daily meeting. But Marion barely spoke to me. I was treated like an interloper on the team. Whenever I was looped into things, it was by someone other than Marion. Sometimes, it felt like I was being trolled. For International Women\u2019s Day, a peer asked me to \u201camplify\u201d a campaign celebrating the \u201cstrength and resilience\u201d of women. I directed our agency to add lots of heart emojis to our tweets.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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Another organizer of the walkout, Meredith, had also had her role diminished. In April, we convened with other organizers on a video chat and decided it was time for a new labor action, this time focussed on retaliation. For me, this wasn\u2019t so much a decision as a recognition that my career at Google was over. Meredith and I sent a letter to the entire walkout list, describing what we\u2019d experienced. By afternoon, the Times<\/em> had published a breaking headline: \u201cGoogle Employees Say They Faced Retaliation After Organizing Walkout.\u201d<\/p>\n

Google\u2019s lawyer and mine began exit negotiations. At T.G.I.F. the week that I left, during the Q. & A., a top question was about my departure: \u201cClaire Stapleton, a legend in Google culture, is leaving because of retaliation and mistreatment. Is the fact that employees barely trust H.R. not considered an issue?\u201d Eileen, the head of H.R., delivered the corporate line, which was that the company had investigated my concerns and found no retaliation. It was my decision to leave, she said, and they respected that decision. The company had also denied retaliating against Meredith. A decade earlier, I might have drafted some version of their tidy talking points. Now my own messy, inconvenient story had been absorbed and neutralized. The next day, escorted by an H.R. representative, I turned in my badge, laptop, and phone, and walked out of the office for the last time.<\/p>\n

The retaliation worked. Most of the walkout\u2019s broad base got the message that the era of sanctioned dissent was over. If you wanted to keep your job, it was time to stick to the script, not that that would be any guarantee: in 2023, Google laid off some twelve thousand people, representing around six per cent of its workforce, and, in the years that followed, an estimated four hundred thousand jobs were eliminated across tech. For a while, Google tried to maintain its two faces. Lorraine, Google\u2019s chief marketing officer, pontificated at conferences and in op-eds about building diverse, inclusive teams. Sundar instituted a company-\u00adwide moment of silence after George Floyd was murdered by police, and the company said that it was donating a hundred-and-seventy-five-million-dollars to support Black businesses and entrepreneurs. Then Trump was re\u00eblected, and the mask slipped in an instant. At the Inauguration, Sundar and Sergey sat behind the President alongside Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, and Jeff Bezos. Google, like many companies, slashed mentions of \u201cinclusion\u201d and \u201cequity\u201d on its websites and ended its diversity hiring targets. Sergey was named to Trump\u2019s White House tech council and dined at Mar-a-Lago with, in the President\u2019s words, his \u201cwonderful MAGA<\/em> girlfriend.\u201d<\/p>\n

Lately, the Creative Lab seems to have a new assignment, to make Google\u2019s aggressive push into artificial intelligence look as friendly as possible. The ads that the company has been putting out to promote its A.I. capabilities are sugary and surreal: sloths and raccoons doing kick flips on skateboards; phones turning into vanilla ice-cream cones, set to twee music that sounds like it belongs in a Wes Anderson movie. The broader goal is simple: if the company\u2019s A.I. feels maximally whimsical, nonthreatening, and emotionally intelligent\u2014Googley<\/em>\u2014you\u2019ll let it deeper into your life. I\u2019d be remiss not to note that, before it was rebranded as Gemini, Google\u2019s A.I. chatbot was called Bard.\u00a0\u2666<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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This was drawn from \u201cDon\u2019t Be Evil: Bad Bosses, Fake Promises, and My Escape from Big Tech.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n

Read more A Dying Poet\u2019s Farewell to the World<\/a><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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