Google’s founders, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, were bona-fide public figures by then, and self-made billionaires multiple times over, but in Charlie’s 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. & A. portion of the proceedings, even adversarial questions were absorbed into the Google spirit—it all melted into laughs, love. Merriam-Webster had added “google” to the dictionary the year before. Fortune had crowned it the “Best Company to Work For” in America. Profits were, as the execs loved to boast, “up and to the right,” fuelled by an online-advertising machine that minted cash beyond Wall Street’s wildest dreams. But the company’s financial success felt almost incidental. What mattered, we told ourselves, was the mission—a conviction that technology could improve the world and that we were helping to build the future. The air in Charlie’s buzzed with collective belief.
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No one else seemed eager to send out a weekly “Here’s how to tune in to TGIF” e-mail, so I volunteered to do it. I kept the notes straight at first, but soon began injecting more voice, writing things like “As the week folds gently in on itself and we collectively blink at the passage of time, we arrive—inevitably, beautifully—at TGIF. Also: beer.” The messages were casual, sly, a little irreverent—proof that Google wasn’t like any other company—while always amplifying the corporate mythology. I wrote about whatever products and feature updates we’d be spotlighting onstage that week as “epistemological experiments” and “peak experiences” in the pursuit of “Meaning and Truth,” 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’d written. One meme was captioned, “I want whatever Claire Stapleton’s on when she’s writing the TGIF emails.” Another christened me the Bard of Google. At Charlie’s, a group of engineers presented me with a wooden plaque naming me the company’s poet laureate. When I was promoted to manager, my performance review credited my “cult following.”
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Eric had pontificated plenty, but Larry was the epitome of techno-optimism: Google wasn’t just going to organize the world’s information, he maintained; it was going to solve humanity’s biggest problems. In 2013, he launched Calico, a health-care company focussed on extending the human life span, and Time magazine ran a cover story with the headline “Can Google Solve Death?” “We need moon shots,” Larry would say, big, world-changing ideas and initiatives, to make employees excited about innovating again. (Curing cancer wasn’t 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—“Have a healthy disregard for the impossible,” “If you’re not doing some things that are crazy, then you’re doing the wrong things”—but 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’d read an autobiography of Nikola Tesla when he was around twelve, and cried—he really emphasized the crying bit—because Tesla died poor. (This, I guess, taught him the all-important life lesson “Commercialize those inventions.”) “Computers should do the hard work,” Larry would repeat, so humans can get back to doing what humans do best: learning, living, and loving.
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But the platform’s dark underbelly was becoming hard to ignore. One of the first “trends” Kevin briefed me on was dubbed Elsagate: a sprawling ecosystem of videos featuring beloved children’s characters in bizarre and profane scenarios—knockoff 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’s 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 “Frozen” 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 “On the Phenomenon of Bullshit Jobs,” about the rise of pointless office work in late capitalism. I read it twice at my desk, open-mouthed. “Huge swathes of people . . . spend their entire working lives performing tasks they secretly believe do not really need to be performed,” Graeber wrote. My co-worker said, “Bit nail-on-the-head, innit?”
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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’s 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’s campaign.) Hard-right 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’t seem to be able to decide.
In the summer of 2016, I was put in charge of coming up with a big-budget 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’s 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’s victory: “Myself as an immigrant and a refugee, I certainly find this election deeply offensive, and I know many of you do, too,” Sergey said. Googlers peppered the executives with anxious questions about whether products like YouTube were reinforcing warped beliefs and making the country more divided.
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 “It’s Raping Time”) and tossed around “gay,” “retard,” and “autistic” as playful insults during gaming playthroughs. His “edgy” humor only fuelled his popularity: for nearly six years, his was the most-subscribed-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 “Death to all Jews.” In another video posted to PewDiePie’s channel, a guy dressed as Jesus declared, “Hitler did absolutely nothing wrong!” Soon YouTube was facing an “adpocalypse,” 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—the emotional lifeblood of the platform—into uproar.
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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 “+1,” 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—just 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-manage the hell out of this. In forty-five minutes, we outlined a rough plan and built an internal site: a “hub and spoke” model, with local leads in every participating office, customizing the day with their own stories and flair.
https://archive.is/EeeAI
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