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Google Confronts Its Bolsheviks



We may have to refine our theories of creative destruction. America’s big tech companies—Google in particular—suddenly seem less at risk from nascent competitors than from the politicization of their own employees.

Google’s leaders conspicuously put their tails between their legs in response to employee protests set off by reports that executives were allowed to leave with nest eggs intact after being accused of inappropriate sexual conduct. Companies obviously need to police bad behavior, but Google execs might have pointed out that nobody, not even the protesting workers, would be happy if their accrued pay and benefits could be denied them on the say-so of a coworker. Plus these are contractual matters.

A more telling loss of control was Google’s surrender to mau-mauing employees when it walked away from a Pentagon deal to develop algorithms to speed the extraction of meaningful information from hours of mostly useless drone footage, as well as a chance to participate in a 10-year project to build out the military’s cloud infrastructure.

It should not have to be pointed out that the technological drift of recent decades has been to make war-fighting less lethal to noncombatants and U.S. troops. Or that the purpose of a powerful military is to deter war. Or that Google et al. will themselves be prime military targets on tomorrow’s cyber battlefield.

Amazon’s Jeff Bezos and

Microsoft
’s

Brad Smith both used the opportunity to speak out against Silicon Valley attempts to treat the U.S. military as a pariah customer.

The Google protests have been led by a group calling itself the Tech Workers Coalition, whose avowed purposes are ideological rather than strictly work-related. It got its start helping the Teamsters organize subcontractors who operate Silicon Valley’s employee shuttle buses.

You may remember these buses: They were once a special target of left-wing and gay groups who blamed arrogant “brogrammers” for driving up San Francisco rents and ruining neighborhoods.

That antipathy has inevitably become more nuanced, or at least subdivided, as tech ranks fill up with many in this same cohort. Google and other companies present themselves as basically hiring IQ, so we’ll idly wonder if today’s troubles are a fruit of that policy or a fruit of abandoning it. The new activists now claim linkage to a “growing movement, not just in tech, but across the country, including teachers, fast-food workers and others who are using their strength in numbers to make real change.”

They want politics to be in control of business. That includes deciding which products and services will be developed. According to San Francisco’s KQED, the activist group is reluctant even to name its “founders” due to the word’s “negative associations with what they call the capitalist-driven ethos that has become pervasive in Silicon Valley.”

Organized labor usually is in favor of anything, including Pentagon contracts, that means work for employees. But the goal here is power. One of the Google employee demands is representation on the company board—also a feature of Elizabeth Warren’s proto-presidential platform. And notice a Journal report this week that showed

Facebook

essentially maneuvering an important executive out of the firm because he offended coworkers by supporting Donald Trump.

Of particular and immediate menace to Google’s top leadership is a sexual neo-Puritanism in the workplace that appears to be highly instrumental—i.e., adopted mainly as a broom to sweep middle-aged white men out of the company.

For the benefit of the New York Times, Google employees conspicuously detailed their dissatisfaction that founder Sergey Brin, chief lawyer David Drummond and former CEO Eric Schmidt retain “influential positions” despite having carried on romantic relationships with colleagues or subordinates. Somehow we doubt Google rank-and-filers will be so anti-sex once the desired purge is completed.

Google’s special problems arise partly from its ill-considered practice of sponsoring internal debate and breast-beating about political and cultural topics unrelated to its business needs. This was the proximate cause of last year’s James Damore debacle: A junior engineer took the invitation to question Google’s diversity efforts and was vilified by coworkers, then summarily fired by a leadership that was clearly running scared from its own employees.

Notice an irony here: Google’s bosses are shielded from any challenge coming from disappointed shareholders by a special voting-rights lockup. This was justified at the time of Google’s initial public offering as protecting management’s ability to make brave, long-term decisions without concern for short-term market reaction.

Now management seems to be in need of some bravery to defend the company’s long-term interests against a small band of employees who feel entitled to substitute their political hobby horses for their employer’s business priorities.



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