I joined Google with some trepidation about working in "big tech", but was initially excited to see that the company, and really, my coworkers, thought and cared deeply about the impact our products had on our users. I learned that google had actually quite strong data protections, and was pushing itself to be better. I found joy in working on truly helpful services. I saw leadership that was responsive to major issues raised by the workforce. Now, I´ve been here long enough to see nearly all of that change. 

During the BLM protests, I grew more critical of my role at Google and the problems inherent in keeping a separation between my work life and my personal values. As I moved to bring more of myself to work, I ran headlong into the Google cultural space, which I now see functions primarily to detract from truly impactful organizing efforts. Leadership deflects employee concerns to this space and appeals to the ERG structure as the voices of the workforce when they are neither responsible nor accountable to employees. Issues about how our technology would impact marginalized communities went unaddressed, and were sidelined as cultural issues. Issues raised about the biases in the ERGs were ignored, and no one in the DEI leadership structure took responsibility for the harmful power dynamics of the ERGs. 

As a Jewish Googler, I was primarily involved in conversations in the Jewglers group. I found no support or care, only a space dedicated to the Zionist political ideology that supported and espoused dangerous rhetoric about the nature of antisemitism, weaponizing this very real form of oppression to undermine and detract from needed conversations and support for other marginalized groups. There was no acknowledgement of the intersectional nature of oppression, but only oppression Olympics, and a monopoly on the definition of antisemitism that was used in conjunction with unique access to leadership offered by the ERG structure to silence other voices. These same voices often engaged in antisemitic tropes towards myself and other Jews at the company, without consequence.

Ultimately, the Google today is a very different company than when I joined. Leadership is no longer involved in discussion with employee concerns. While there are many excellent and caring people in the DEI organization, DEI work is limited to hiring and inclusion, stopping short of addressing the inconvenient truths about how our products harm marginalized groups by deflecting these concerns into the cultural space. This change accelerated soon after Project Maven, when leadership realized that an empowered workforce, capable of expressing their ethical values could endanger Google's bid for military contracts. Since then, Google has aggressively locked down information, siloed sensitive parts of the company, and resorted to corpspeak rather than direct conversation with employees. They have pursued military contracts with the same and worse potential impacts on our own users in secret, pitching very different stories to employees and to the defense contracting sector. They have narrowly interpreted the AI principles to have minimal impact on our projects, focusing only on what we build rather than the direct impact on our users to whom we give our powerful technology. We need to ask ourselves: do we want a world where militaries around the world are training AI for surveillance and targeting on our custom hardware, using our powerful optimization methods? Do we want to enable the AI-assisted oppression of migrants? The police surveillance of marginalized communities? Do we want to give the nationalist armies of the world our technology? If there is anyone who we wouldn't contract with, do we want to be the arbiter of that line? Or do we need to stand by the original theory behind Google, that we can make money without doing evil and opt out of turning Google into a defense contractor.