Google CEO Tells Employees to Leave Politics at Home
Is Google pulling back from the woke mind virus it spent years spreading? Sundar Pichai, the tech giant’s CEO (as well as the CEO of Alphabet Inc., Google’s parent company), released a memo last week saying, among other things, that the personal politics of Google’s employees should be left at home, and that the company is a business, not a platform for their pet causes. This is assumed to partly be in response to a protest from Google employees over the company’s Cloud contract with the Israeli government; twenty-eight of the protesting employees were fired. You can see the relevant part of the memo in the video below, which is a news report on the topic from CNBC:
My impulse reaction to proclamations like this is to assume it’s a smokescreen to buy the company some cover (I don’t mean Bob Iger and Disney, but also, I mean Bob Iger and Disney), but this is coming at an interesting time for Google. The reporter in that video, Deirdre Bosa, mentions the “increasingly competitive race in AI,” and if Pichai is on the level, I think that’s right on the money. The unveiling of Google’s AI program, Gemini, was nothing short of a disaster for the company, not only making their political biases crystal clear for anyone who doubted them or simply wasn’t paying attention but doing so in a way that made them look ridiculously stupid and childish, if not outright hostile and vindictive. We know George Washington wasn’t a black lesbian; your AI program is not going to convince us otherwise, and nobody’s buying your “just a silly mistake” excuse, especially because it kept happening, and only in one direction. That’s a massive setback for a company in competition with other brands to get a foothold on an emerging technology; even if Google improves Gemini, who’s going to trust them now? The next version of Gemini has to be absolutely perfect to make up for a calamity like that, which means it probably won’t be available for a long time – which gives Google’s competitors a nice window in which to outpace them. Imagine the revenue they may well have lost over a bunch of arrogant developers and technicians who wanted to make an idiotic statement about how woke they are.
Combine that with a bunch of employees staging a mass sit-in at various Google offices in an attempt to scuttle what I’m sure is a lucrative deal with Israel and Pichai has a problem he can no longer wave away, regardless of his politics. (And I don’t feel bad for the morons who got fired over it; if you have that big a moral issue with what the company is doing, quit and work somewhere else. The whole world doesn’t grind to a halt because you disagree with someone.) That’s why I think this shift could be real; it’s not a failed movie or even a string of them, but an army of lunatic employees threatening to derail massive business opportunities for the company. It also probably helps that Sundar Pichai is over twenty years younger than Bob Iger and still has a lot of money left to make. I look forward to seeing where this goes, and not just for cultural reasons (although, of course, also for those); think of the technological advances a company with the money and resources of Google can create if it doesn’t have to worry about a cavalcade of dumber-than-a-doorknob employees sabotaging it. We could get that flying car one day – or, barring that, at least some flashy new screensavers.
