What’s going on at Google?
Employee protests, that’s what:
After a day of global protests, employees at Google’s Silicon Valley headquarters added their voices to calls for major change to company policies on gender pay equity and sexual misconduct.
Chants of “Stand up, fight back” and “Women’s rights are workers’ rights” reverberated through a crowd of several hundred workers who gathered on the eastern edge of the company’s vast Mountain View campus at about 11am on Thursday.
Google is not alone in Silicon Valley in being a tech company that veers to the left. Oh, I don’t doubt that a number of Google employees at the Silicon Valley campus are on the right—probably keeping a fairly low profile—but I also don’t doubt that most of its employees and executives share a basic pro-left political orientation. So one might call this a blue-on-blue battle, in the main.
But just try to get much detail about what the protesters are actually saying, other than the generality that women make less money there than men. But are the protesters saying that women make less than men doing the same exact job and working the same exact hours with the same production and the same seniority? Or are they just comparing salary differentials in general (by sex) and finding them wanting?
I’ve read several articles (including this older one) dealing with the alleged pay gap at Google, and so far I haven’t found any details about the form the discrimination is alleged to take, although those details make a difference—to me, anyway, although perhaps not to so many of the protesters.
And then there are the charges about the ignoring and/or coverup of sexual harassment charges at the company:
…female employees who spoke in a packed courtyard aired serious grievances.
One organizer of the California headquarters event shared the story of an anonymous co-worker who said she complained of sexual harassment by a Google vice-president, who then kept his job at the company for three more years.
Why did he keep his job? Was it because the company was investigating and affording him that arcane and apparently somewhat-outdated protection (particularly on the left), due process? If so, was the company instead supposed to fire him immediately because She Said So? And then tar and feather him on the way out? Would that have made them happy?
I don’t know. Maybe that’s not what this is about at all. But from that article it was extremely difficult to tell.
One of the people who was alleged to have sexually harassed someone and yet gotten an exceptionally generous severance package was Andy Rubin, the developer of the Android phone system. He denies the harassment charges.
Here’s what Wiki has to say about the harassment allegations and Rubin’s departure from Google:
On October 31, 2014, he left Google after nine years at the company to start an incubator for hardware startups.
While the departure was presented to the media as an amicable one where Rubin would spend more time on philanthropy and start-ups, according to media reports in 2017 and 2018, [Google] CEO Larry Page personally asked for Rubin’s resignation after a sexual harassment claim against Rubin was found to be credible. Rubin disputed these reports and denied wrongdoing. The incident, among others, led to protests from Google’s employee workforce in 2018 over Rubin reportedly receiving a $90 million “exit package” to expedite his separation from the company. Google responded by sending a memo to employees saying no employees dismissed due to sexual harassment concerns after 2016 had received payouts.
Not much to learn there. Accusations, yes. But were the charges true or false? And what were they, exactly?
I found much more information here, however (emphasis mine):
According to the report [recently in The NY Times], [Google] stayed silent about sexual misconduct allegations against three executives over the past decade, including Android creator Andy Rubin, who left the company in 2014. Tech news site The Information previously reported that Google had investigated Rubin for an inappropriate relationship while at the company.
But the Times uncovered new details, including a reported $90 million exit package that Rubin is said to have been granted when he departed the company. The Times reported that Rubin was accused of coercing a female employee, with whom he’d been having affair, into performing oral sex in a hotel room in 2013. A Google investigation found her claim to be credible and then-CEO Larry Page asked Rubin to resign, according to the Times.
Sam Singer, a lawyer for Rubin, disputed the allegations in the Times report.
“None of the allegations made about Mr. Rubin are true,” he told CNN Business in a statement, calling them “demonstrably false.”
So these allegations were made by a woman with whom Rubin was having an affair. That doesn’t mean coercion couldn’t have been involved; of course it could have been. But it does put the charges in an immediately different light. And since the word “credible” has merely come to mean “it wasn’t an absolute impossibility that this might have occurred,” it remains well-nigh impossible to figure out what may have actually happened.
Which brings us to the motherlode, the NY Times story that appeared about a week ago:
What Google did not make public was that an employee had accused Mr. Rubin of sexual misconduct. The woman, with whom Mr. Rubin had been having an extramarital relationship, said he coerced her into performing oral sex in a hotel room in 2013, according to two company executives with knowledge of the episode. Google investigated and concluded her claim was credible, said the people, who spoke on the condition that they not be named, citing confidentiality agreements. Mr. Rubin was notified, they said, and Mr. Page asked for his resignation.
Google could have fired Mr. Rubin and paid him little to nothing on the way out. Instead, the company handed him a $90 million exit package, paid in installments of about $2 million a month for four years, said two people with knowledge of the terms. The last payment is scheduled for next month.
Mr. Rubin was one of three executives that Google protected over the past decade after they were accused of sexual misconduct. In two instances, it ousted senior executives, but softened the blow by paying them millions of dollars as they departed, even though it had no legal obligation to do so. In a third, the executive remained in a highly compensated post at the company. Each time Google stayed silent about the accusations against the men.
So, now companies are supposed to publicize unsubstantiated allegations as long as they are “credible,” and to not only fire the accused but punish them by not giving them severance packages? And all of this can and should be done without a trial or proof (at least as far as I can tell)? And all reported in the Times, told to reporters by sources in the company who remain anonymous to the public and therefore cannot be questioned or evaluated for reliability.
I don’t know about you, but this whole thing sends a chill down my spine. In the case of Rubin (the only accused Google executive we get a few details about), that chill is about what appears to be the blowing up of something that seems to be a fairly typical lover’s quarrel in an area of human interaction that is unbelievably murky: the way that two lovers in a consensual relationship negotiate the sexual acts in which they are going to be engaging. What is “coercion” under those circumstances? What sort of “coercion” is actionable? How on earth do you prove or disprove that it happened the way it’s said to have happened?
And no, you cannot just believe one sex or other. Correction: of course you can, and many do, but that goes against our entire system of justice and fairness and replaces it with a new type of pseudo, witch-hunt “justice”: social justice. And yes, I know, that’s the goal of the left; it’s not an accident.
One of the many takeaways from this is don’t have sex with anyone in your company. Good luck enforcing that one, right? Nor would it even actually protect men (or women, for that matter, although it’s usually men who are accused) against false accusations by someone outside of the company. And that includes a wife, I suppose, who could just as easily make the sort of charge that was made against Rubin.
We’re not given any details of the charge of coercion against Rubin in terms of the form the coercion was alleged to have taken. Maybe Rubin pointed a gun at his lover’s head, right? I doubt it. Maybe he threatened to fire her. That would at least make sense in terms of the company’s having a special interest in the story. But how on earth could anyone ascertain the truth or falsehood of such claims, unless they were backed up with emails from Rubin that contained similar threats? And if he’s dumb enough to have done that, maybe he should be fired for stupidity alone.
I certainly haven’t a clue what actually happened between these two people. But neither do any of those protestors, I can pretty much guarantee.
Just to make the Rubin story even more convoluted, here’s a quote in that Times article, from Rubin and his spokespeople:
Sam Singer, a spokesman for Mr. Rubin, disputed that the technologist had been told of any misconduct at Google and said he left the company of his own accord.
“The New York Times story contains numerous inaccuracies about my employment at Google and wild exaggerations about my compensation,” Mr. Rubin said in a statement after the publication of this article. “Specifically, I never coerced a woman to have sex in a hotel room. These false allegations are part of a smear campaign by my ex-wife to disparage me during a divorce and custody battle.”
Wow. Just wow. A divorce and custody battle, the classic venue in which false accusations sometimes appear.
The Times article is long, and there’s a bit more in there about Rubin:
[His] success gave Mr. Rubin more latitude than most Google executives, said four people who worked with him.
Mr. Rubin often berated subordinates as stupid or incompetent, they said. Google did little to curb that behavior.
A little voice in my head says “well, perhaps they were stupid and incompetent.” Was Rubin’s initial problem, then, a lack of tact and people skills? Perhaps. It’s not an unusual problem for those who are very tech-oriented and who then are called on to manage people.
And then there’s this:
It took action only when security staff found bondage sex videos on Mr. Rubin’s work computer, said three former and current Google executives briefed on the incident. That year, the company docked his bonus, they said.
You mean like, Fifty Shades of Grey type stuff? But isn’t that mainstream now? Of course, it’s very stupid to put porn on your work computer, if that’s what Rubin did. What in fact did Rubin do?:
Mr. Singer, the spokesman for Mr. Rubin, said the executive “is known to be transparent and forthcoming with his feedback.” He said Mr. Rubin never called anyone incompetent.
Mr. Rubin, 55, who met his wife at Google, also dated other women at the company while married, said four people who worked with him. In 2011, he had a consensual relationship with a woman on the Android team who did not report to him, they said. They said Google’s human resources department was not informed, despite rules requiring disclosure when managers date someone who directly or indirectly reports to them.
In a civil suit filed this month by Mr. Rubin’s ex-wife, Rie Rubin, she claimed he had multiple “ownership relationships” with other women during their marriage, paying hundreds of thousands of dollars to them. The couple were divorced in August.
The suit included a screenshot of an August 2015 email Mr. Rubin sent to one woman. “You will be happy being taken care of,” he wrote. “Being owned is kinda like you are my property, and I can loan you to other people.”
We are supposed to take this literally? Obviously, it seems likely that Rubin had a pretty scummy and promiscuous sex life. Not so very unusual among powerful people. But I highly doubt this particular exchange was anything other than banter of the sort you often find in romance novels—and porn. The money was probably real enough, but it seems as though everyone involved was a consenting adult.
And then we get this, which is apparently a further reference to the charges I already discussed, about coercion to have oral sex:
Mr. Rubin was casually seeing another woman he knew from Android, according to two company executives briefed on the relationship. The two had started dating in 2012 when he was still leading the division, these people said.
By 2013, she had cooled on him and wanted to break things off but worried it would affect her career, said the people. That March, she agreed to meet him at a hotel, where she said he pressured her into oral sex, they said. The incident ended the relationship.
The woman waited until 2014 before filing a complaint to Google’s human resources department and telling officials about the relationship, the people said. Google began an investigation.
What does “casually seeing” and “dating” mean these days, in this context? Are we to understand they were just dating without having sex? Is that even believable (credible)? Other reports refer to this as an affair (and earlier in the same article the Times has called it an “extramarital relationship”), so again it’s impossible to understand what’s actually being alleged here. My best guess is that “casually seeing” means “having regular sex without commitment.”
The woman says she had thoughts of breaking it off (the “casual seeing,” or the affair? Or were they one and the same?) but did not express those thoughts to the man in question because she’s worried about the effect on her career (duh, maybe she should have thought of that before she began a some type of affair with a married higher-up at the company? Or maybe she began that affair with the thought that it would help her career?).
Again, the “pressure” or coercion is unspecified in the story, although I would imagine it was specified by the woman when she detailed her charges against Rubin to the company. I wonder why the Times—which has seen fit to tell us just about everything else it can find—hasn’t told us the details of that. Perhaps for some reason the reporters couldn’t get the information about the nature of the coercion, or perhaps they got it and failed to publish it because the information weakens their story in some way.
And then, of course, there’s her wait before filing a complaint. What was that about? We’re not told.
Do the Google employees who are demonstrating about this know, or care, about any of its oddities? Do they entertain any doubt at all about Rubin’s guilt? Do they know what he is even supposed to be guilty of? How many of them just believe that a bad man was mean to a woman, and Google didn’t immediately place him in the stocks so that they could throw rotten tomatoes at him?
Who knows? Not me.
Heist on its own SJW petard. Like they say, get out the popcorn.
Maybe Google should hire James Damore as some sort of anti-harassment enforcement officer. 🙂
I enjoy left eating left. They want to make the rules but they did not expect to live by them. Cannibalism does a body good.
Gringo; parker:
I’ll not pass the popcorn.
And I don’t enjoy it.
I don’t enjoy injustice committed against anyone. I don’t enjoy watching unproven allegations destroy a person, left or right.
I don’t enjoy it when people are not protected by due process. I don’t enjoy it when the Times stirs up demonstrations on the reports of anonymous sources. I believe that everyone, right or left, should be protected by the law.
I don’t believe in cutting a great road in the law to get after the “devil.”
But, Neo, this what the left does. The further left, the greater the need for purity in the ideology. I can’t summon much sympathy for a leftist who suddenly finds themselves under attack, even if it’s a false accusation. They helped make that bed, now it sucks to have to lie in it. They certainly deserve fair due process, but karma can be a bitch.
One of the subsidiary definitions of feminism: an open mouth saying “I want”.
The tech industry leans so far left, I think, because the Democrats have been supporting H1B visas and the big tech companies, plus some semi-tech, like Southern California Edison and Disney, replaced a lot of American citizen tech workers and coders with H1B visa holders. The visa holders are indentured servants who would lose their green cards if they dared to change jobs or demand more money.
physics guy:
Oh, I understand “karma is a bitch.” But what overrides that for me is my horror at lack of due process.
In addition, I have no idea what the actual politics are of the people being accused. Do you? I don’t make any assumptions.
Andy Rubin’s Wiki profile says he was nicknamed “Android” (Andy=Android, get it?) earlier in life (1980s) when he worked at Apple, because he was so fond of robots. The Android phone was named after him, not the other way around.
I have yet to see a single article about him that says anything about his politics. Not that it matters to me, as I’ve already said. But if you’re rejoicing because he’s on the left, you better make sure he really is before you celebrate.
Here’s a fairly lengthy article about him in 2007, in the Times, back when he was a star at Google and the Android phone was in development there:
There’s a lot more about robots, engineer-type pranks, and fun schmoozing with his engineer buddies. Also this sort of thing:
This guy seems like the geekiest of geeks, really obsessed with robotics and gadgets (and perhaps quite secondarily, sex) and not much else. He doesn’t sound political, and he sounds like something of a maverick at Google.
Google could have just fired him, not paid him for inventing the Android OS and then pulled it off of the billions (?) of machines that run it. Easy peasy.
The people walking out are not the geeks. They are the affirmative action hires. The real geeks are probably a threat that doesn’t require real sexual harassment in this atmosphere. I was an engineer before medical school and my engineer friends and I still tell engineer jokes.
Men and women are equal in rights and complementary in Nature.
The physiological causes and evolutionary fitness to distinguish between the male and female sex, between a man and a woman, between masculine and feminine gender, while critical, are few and far between.
First, they came for the lefties, a class of lefty; a “color,” a diversity class; a baby, a selective-child… is the opening to historical violations of human and civil rights, again, and again, and again.
And Harvard is facing a lawsuit that claims they used the diversity doctrine (i.e. color judgments) to selectively exclude/discriminate the politically congruent: Asian-Americans (half-breeds), or rather the politically unprofitable: Americans of Asian descent.
Nothing there about his contributions to Gooogle and the forwarding of its success, is there? Nah! Would you care? the good a man does dies with him, and the bad lives forever. Judas as one of the twelve disciples surely did some good before succumbing to twelve pieces of silver.
Kinda like writing headlines in our age.
Classic, epic post Neo. Good questions all.
Some of them were running through my head too as I was reading the NYT story the other day. A news story with so many obvious holes is no story at all.
But who are we kidding? They don’t care. It’s all about servicing progressive and social justice narratives. Nothing else matters to these crusaders.
Cicero:
Nothing where about his contributions to Google? Wiki certainly has it, and that 2007 article in the Times is very detailed (the one I quoted at length in my comment at 7:28 PM).
The guy basically invented and developed the Android phone, so obviously his contribution to Google was vast.
In a nutshell, he had some kinky, consensual relationships with Googlers who were not reporting to directly or indirectly to him, including the woman who said she was coerced. By ‘coerced’ she means she wanted to say she had a headache but didn’t.
The kinky stuff is now considered ho-hum in Frisco-Silicon Valley and you’ll be labeled an intolerant bigot if you object to something like the Folsom Street Fair.
“people … who spoke on the condition that they not be named, citing confidentiality agreements.” Is there a carveout in confidentiality agreements that says, “Under no circumstances will I disclose confidential information except anonymously to New York Times reporters”?
The women have jumped the shark. I never bought into the believe the woman angle because I was put into the position of judge/jury and executioner a time or two. In the absence of compelling evidence, I will always default to no harm/no foul. Then I will move to separate the two so they never work together again and if that means transferring one to another command, that’s what happens. I usually transferred the one I could most afford to lose. Guess which one that was.
This is the result of a critical mass of progressive women in the workforce, raised in a culture of self-regard and victimhood. They each think they should be believed on nothing more than their word.
Incidentally, why is it an offense at Google to have bondage sex videos on your work computer when Google is hosting them on its Youtube servers?
Neo, I’m with you on the due process thing.
Having said that, I can’t help thinking. How do these people expect to be happy living like this?
Weird, you’re resigned to workplace sexual relationships. That’s one of the oldest rules in the book. I’ve seen the lessons against it acted out over and over in both military and civilian life. Even before #metoo, ad nauseum, “dipping your pen in the company ink-well” was known as a fast track to getting fired. Same if doing the deed with customers or vendors. It’s an inherent conflict of interest if one is boinging subordinates. Then there’s this guy’s alleged email discussing “ownership”.
Not one of your best screeds, imho.
Born Free:
Yes, I tend to acknowledge reality. Call me Sancho Panza rather than Don Q.
If that’s being “resigned” to it, then I suppose I am.
Much of the evil in the world is done by people thinking they can perfect other people in ways that are not realistic. That doesn’t mean I condone wrongdoing. If I had my way, no one would exploit anyone else.
But I am realistic, as I said.
The “Do No Evil” was pretty much a giveaway. They have done nothing but since…
“I don’t believe in cutting a great road in the law to get after the ‘devil.'”
Neither do I, but nor do I think one can defend an implacable enemy to death. From the French Revolution to the Chavez Revolution, leftists have proven completely incapable of admitting they made any mistakes, let alone learning from them. They’ve burned their hands on the socialist fire to the point they’re cauterized at the armpits, yet still try to force other people to do the same because “it MUST work, once everyone else’s arms are burned off too.”
They can’t learn, but they can catch individuals off guard and alone and overwhelm them one by one. Slowly they will win the war of attrition, if we don’t fight back, at least by forcing the leftists to suffer and die under laws just as unlivable as the laws they would inflict upon the rest of us.
It’s not just Google being outed as part of the Evil Oppressive Patriarchy.
ttps://www.theguardian.com/stage/2018/nov/02/ballet-stage-me-too-sexual-abuse-harassment
The #MeToo movement may have been started to take down conservatives, but most of the men accused, disgraced, and fired because of “credible” allegations have been on the Left (Neo will know better than I where the Ballet World resides ideologically, but I would be very surprised if it is on the Right).
While supporting all due process and rights of the accused, if the women are correct about the assaults, I hope that they do get justice.
IMO the primary enabler of sexual abuse is mostly power, not politics; it’s just that this is the era of the Left’s dominance rather than the Right’s.
However, having the proper political policies shouldn’t mean never having to say you’re sorry.
A couple of years ago I remember hearing of “hookers & blow” style parties in Silicon Valley. If true there should be lots of metoo stories available.
Google is very much done. It’s coasting because of the huge advances and smart commercial decisions made in the 90s and early 00s, but it’s slowly declining. The only thing that works as before is the AI department, which is impressive and probably the last refuge of white and asian male nerds in the company… until the day they will decide to multiculturalize and diversify it, which will happen eventually.
50% chance the “coercion” was him saying: “If you don’t want to have sex I’ll find a woman who does.”
50% it was him saying: “If you don’t want to have sex you’ll have to find a new sugardaddy.”
Either way it’s not coercion or harrassment. It is just negotiating the terms of a voluntary relationship, a more specifically prostitutional relationship in the latter case, but fully voluntary in either case.
Having myself once come close to losing my job because She Said So, I think it’s important to step back and recognize that, unfortunately, there’s no right to “due process” in the corporate world or academia in situations like this. The best thing men can do is to avoid working or attending school at such places, and publicize on line the most egregious among them.
These people are are trying to take over the company.
This is a sensible (prison?) tactic: pick someone powerful and give him a public beatdown. Every Google manager and executive will be afraid of them. Even if they don’t succeed this time, this is a serious show of strength and they can try again next time. Also, this strengthens their position and now they can’t be fired, because it would be a form of retaliation. Any attempt would lead to an even bigger and more protracted strike and a new wave of negative publicity.
Google chiefs are about to effectively lose control of the company. These people have become the “stakeholders” that have to be invited to any important committee meeting and can dictate terms.
Soon, no important decision will be taken at Google without considering the “social ramifications” and “impact on marginalized groups”. Some diversity experts are about to land their dream job. Google is extremely rich and all ripe for plunder.
And the Google chiefs deserve it, for having fallen for all the PC stuff, like diversity and hiring underrepresented groups. These people are the diversity hires and their left-wing allies who pushed for their hiring in the first place.
They have made their bed, now let them lie in it.
I am not quite sure how to express this but I am reminded of employment rights in Europe which result in very high rates of unemployment, often disguised as worker’s comp.
In both cases, it is great to be the one receiving the benefit of the policy but the cost of the policy causes fewer people to be able to benefit at even the most basic level.
In the case of Andy Rubin or similar people who can provide great value to a company but who do not seem to have the social skills required to negotiate safely through the increasing complicated rules of the politically woke, it seems like there is probably a niche for companies that will provide prostitutes the same way that they provide company cafeterias so that valuable employees can spend more time working and less time distracted. If legal considerations are significant enough, Nevada is not that far from Silicon Valley.
Our infrastructure is owned and controlled by leftist nut jobs. Regulation is in order.
What MB said, x100. This is a deliberate mau-mauing by Social Justice Inc., for the sake of taking effective control. It’s a horse’s head in the bed of Big Tech. At least when Al Sharpton, Jesse Jackson, et al. used to deliver shakedowns like this, they were generally content to go away once they got paid.
The late, great Tom Wolfe wrote about this very thing in 2000. It’s his book called “Hooking Up” and gets into the Silicon Valley culture. It includes the fanatical devotion to technological innovation, the all-encompassing lifestyle that practically encouraged work-related sexual encounters, the divorce and “intramarriage” where you shed your wife for a co-worker in the industry.
And now the #metoo fad has emerged to bite the big swinging dicks who screwed and abandoned too many lovers. And, Neo, none of them are victims. The men who betrayed their marriage vows and the women who just wanted to have fun … and a better job in return for sex, a commodity that never ran out.
Interesting post, Neo. That’s a lot more detail than I have seen anywhere else.
Based on the Google work environment presented in the James Damore lawsuit, Google has been encouraging its employees to blur their work and personal lives for years. Employees post all sorts of personal details and promote political views on in-house systems designed to facilitate and encourage it. Employees can be and are selected for work groups based on these politics/lifestyle expressions; HR disciplines employees whose expressed views/lifestyle choice promotion “offends” others. Employees are encouraged to date other Google employees.
Given all this, I bet there are all sorts of ambiguous relationships such as Rubin’s. Bet this gets messier, and Google keeps giving in to the monster they’ve created.
Liberals eating liberals. Yum, yum, tasty. I’m guessing a liberal woman smelled the money, and knew it was easy pickings. It’s a liberal thingy.
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I’m with Neo on this. Just because I hated his Android phone system and it sounds like I wouldn’t touch him with a ten-foot pole if I were single, that doesn’t mean I have to believe vague sexual allegations about him. Even people I dislike at companies I dislike are entitled to some kind of due process.
The WSJ article about this yesterday says that one of the demands the women are making is that the “Diversity Officer” report directly to the CEO, which the WSJ says is becoming more common. Well, this is the kind of thing you get when you start having “Diversity Officers” in the first place.
Thanks for reading a lot of things I wouldn’t have, Neo.
A thing I haven’t seen discussed (I may have missed it in this very detailed examination of the question) is that often executives’ “compensation” for leaving is contractual. It’s to get them to walk away quietly and not run to competitors with what they know. This “transparency” demand of the protestors can put the company (and in the case of Google, users’ security) at risk in that way – fire Rubin with nothing, and he takes his knowledge and sells it where he can.
The tech industry leans so far left, I think, because
Disagree. A hypothesis
The country has been resorting into parallel cultural dispensations and the sort of people attracted to tech are (1) gauche to begin with or (2) libertarian spergs who have craven reactions to being yelled at by liberal women or (3) various others who keep to themselves. An older generation like Gates or Allen or Wozniak or Jobs had a different self-understanding and did not evaluate themselves or their employees according to their subscription to a broader cultural dispensation. Not so characters like Brin and Dorsey and they’ve gradually manufactured institutional cultures where in-groups and out-groups are defined by such subscriptions and occupational identities wherein subscribing to them is part of the clothing you wear as a tech person. Dissidents like Damore are not hired and when they’re identified, they’re expelled. Tech companies are growing increasing monocultural which in turn renders their employees increasingly disoriented. You would think a sensible firm wouldn’t want to devote manpower to policing content and just tell the government and the world that they’re common carriers. The way Google and Facebook behave makes very little sense to an ordinary person.
Also, an older generation of businessmen might have thought of politicians as fungible, and took an interest in building relationships with politicians to contain the degree to which the regulatory state imposed costs on them, and (if they were wicked) to arrange for the regulatory state to generate barriers to entry in their industry. It didn’t matter what the politician thought about other matters as long as he carried water for you. Brin and Dorsey and Zuckerberg and Bezos have gone out of their way to make themselves targets and get mixed up in disputes that have no impact on their business interests.
The media, the entertainment industry, and now tech are run by people who fancy themselves cultural combatants and will use their business assets in that endeavour.
And I don’t enjoy it.
I don’t like it when people are dealt with unjustly. That having been said, this fellow will land on his feet and (I’d wager) bears more responsibility for his trouble than most others under attack. I’d give priority to other causes. (The attacks on Brett Kavanaugh and the damage done to Mark Judge in the process make my blood boil. Kavanaugh is through the worst of it, but his family life is still disfigured by the constant presence of security personnel; Judge, who is an impecunious old bachelor who takes whatever wage work is available, has a mess of legal debt).
Forty years ago, Eastman Kodak was just too huge where I grew up (and regarded very congenially by all its stakeholders). Thirty years ago, you could still find articles in print examining the contrasting trajectories of Sears and Montgomery Ward; Sears was riding high. The disappearance of these companies from the landscape is a source of a certain amount of tristesse. Not so would be the self-destruction of Google and Twitter and the Sorosphere enterprises. That would be in the public interest. As for Facebook, I’m hoping a corporate raider takes it away from Zuckerberg and fires all the content police.
Google is a innovative company, and very powerful. It feels like their current culture could stifle innovation, unless their new innovation is the thought police.
Soon, no important decision will be taken at Google without considering the “social ramifications” and “impact on marginalized groups”. Some diversity experts are about to land their dream job. Google is extremely rich and all ripe for plunder.
The “Diversity” thing is going to kill them off. If they drive away the “nerds” it will go faster.
I’m reading “Life after Google.”
Neo, the excerpts you provide hint that perhaps Mr. Rubin dabbled with dominance/submission games as part of his sexual activities.
For the purposes of argument, suppose this to be true. Would that not make it very, very difficult to assess coercion in a given sexual encounter?
Google is hardly the first company to attempt utopian visions, they date back to the beginning of the industrial revolution. IBM may have been the first tech company to give it a shot by issuing its workers stock back in the 1920s (IIRC). The workers preferred money, though a few who hung onto their stock retired as millionaires. But as the poem goes:
Presumably, if a company is purely AI, then it won’t have “these kinds” of problems.
Presumably.
(Maybe that’s why they’re pushing so hard on AI?)
W Krebs:
Yes, that’s part of what I was referring to with my Fifty Shades of Grey reference.
Was the woman’s name:
O
?
(The story of O …)
50 shades.
Maybe HE was bound up and he verbally told her what to do — which she now claims is “coercion”. Now I’m getting myself interested …
Nahhh.
Sex. Infidelity. Lies. False memories.
Lies on both sides (he probably was having sex)
Art Deco on November 3, 2018 at 10:16 am at 10:16 am said:
… Thirty years ago, you could still find articles in print examining the contrasting trajectories of Sears and Montgomery Ward; Sears was riding high. The disappearance of these companies from the landscape is a source of a certain amount of tristesse. Not so would be the self-destruction of Google and Twitter and the Sorosphere enterprises. That would be in the public interest. As for Facebook, I’m hoping a corporate raider takes it away from Zuckerberg and fires all the content police.
* * *
Thanks for giving me a new word — which seems to be a good antonymn to schadenfreude, which is what I would feel if the SJWs destroy GooTwitBook.
Art Deco on November 3, 2018 at 9:52 am at 9:52 am said:
…. The way Google and Facebook behave makes very little sense to an ordinary person.
…Brin and Dorsey and Zuckerberg and Bezos have gone out of their way to make themselves targets and get mixed up in disputes that have no impact on their business interests.
The media, the entertainment industry, and now tech are run by people who fancy themselves cultural combatants and will use their business assets in that endeavour.
* * *
Those who would make themselves into Kingmakers should read some of the history that is so accessible on-line these days.
The point now is no longer business, but power — raw, and unfiltered through the usual back-scratching of politicians and corporations,
Jamie on November 3, 2018 at 9:40 am at 9:40 am said:
A thing I haven’t seen discussed (I may have missed it in this very detailed examination of the question) is that often executives’ “compensation” for leaving is contractual. It’s to get them to walk away quietly and not run to competitors with what they know. This “transparency” demand of the protestors can put the company (and in the case of Google, users’ security) at risk in that way – fire Rubin with nothing, and he takes his knowledge and sells it where he can.
* * *
I also noticed the omission; there is no way he didn’t have a platinum-with-diamonds parachute clause somewhere.
The protestors are either naive or just plain ignorant, and most are being played by the ones who are neither.
Irwin Chusid on November 2, 2018 at 10:59 pm at 10:59 pm said:
“people … who spoke on the condition that they not be named, citing confidentiality agreements.” Is there a carveout in confidentiality agreements that says, “Under no circumstances will I disclose confidential information except anonymously to New York Times reporters”?
* * *
Yes.
Related news: don’t talk to journalists using any kind of satire or even seriousness if you might offend someone somewhere somehow, because they don’t mind sharing private conversations.
https://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/food-and-drink/waitrose-food-magazine-editor-william-sitwell-resign-killing-vegans-a8610106.html
“The editor of Waitrose Food magazine has resigned following controversies surrounding a comment he made about a “killing vegans” article.
A spokesperson for the supermarket confirmed to The Independent that William Sitwell will be stepping down with immediate effect from the role he held for almost 20 years.
…
Sitwell, who also appears as a critic on the BBC programme MasterChef, made the comment in response to a pitch from a plant-based food writer, Selene Nelson, who had emailed the editor suggesting a series on vegan recipes.
In his email to Nelson, which went viral after she posted a screenshot on Twitter, he wrote: “Hi Selene. Thanks for this. How about a series on killing vegans, one by one. Ways to trap them? How to interrogate them properly?
“Expose their hypocrisy? Force-feed them meat? Make them eat steak and drink red wine?”.
…
Speaking to Buzzfeed News, Nelson, who follows a vegan diet herself, explained that she was deeply shocked by Sitwell’s response.
“I’ve never seen anything like it,” she said.
“I’ve written about many divisive topics, like capital punishment and murder cases and domestic violence, and I’ve never had a response like that to any of my articles or pitches.
“And he’s the editor. He’s representing Waitrose and he’s talking about ‘killing vegans, one by one’?”.
…
At the time, Sitwell responded with an apologetic statement, saying: “I love and respect people of all appetites be they vegan, vegetarian or meat eaters, which I show week in week out through my writing, editing and broadcasting. I apologise profusely to anyone who has been offended or upset by this”.
A spokesperson for Waitrose said: “Even though this was a private email, William’s gone too farand his words are extremely inappropriate, insensitive and absolutely do not represent our views. We’ll be taking up this matter with William”.
It’s not the first time Sitwell has expressed animosity towards vegans.
In January, he lamented the “avalanche” of vegan cookbooks being released in an article for The Times.”
* * *
Aside from the facts that the ethically-challenged “journalist” released a private email into the public simply because it hurt her feelings, that the comment was clearly satirical and proves the “journalist” and her kindred have no sense of humor (think “literally-seriously ala Salena Zito’s Maxim), that the answer was in keeping with other writings by Sitwell which the “journalist” ought to have been aware of when she pitched the idea, that the apology was craven and useless — a better course has been taken by those who tell the SJWs to pound sand, that the corporation as usual would not back their long-term employee over a vindictive unethical nobody…aside from all of that:
If you can’t even make jokes about vegans now, then the end of the world is here.
Gilligan on November 3, 2018 at 6:01 am at 6:01 am said:
I am not quite sure how to express this but I am reminded of employment rights in Europe which result in very high rates of unemployment, often disguised as worker’s comp.
In both cases, it is great to be the one receiving the benefit of the policy but the cost of the policy causes fewer people to be able to benefit at even the most basic level.
In the case of Andy Rubin or similar people who can provide great value to a company but who do not seem to have the social skills required to negotiate safely through the increasing complicated rules of the politically woke, it seems like there is probably a niche for companies that will provide prostitutes the same way that they provide company cafeterias so that valuable employees can spend more time working and less time distracted. If legal considerations are significant enough, Nevada is not that far from Silicon Valley.
* * *
Employment in Europe: true, and the minimum-wage increases and continuously-upgraded federally-mandated “work rights” will have the same effect here — if you can’t afford to fire anyone, then you can’t afford to hire them either.
Employment in Nevada: a novel solution for business, but not unheard of for armies.
Employment of nerdy geeks: you diss them at your peril; they may not attack openly, and may even pretend to go along with the SJWs (some with genuine contrition until a tipping point is reached), but eventually the blow-back to unjust accusations — or interference in their work — will occur.
Lizzy on November 3, 2018 at 7:01 am at 7:01 am said:
Interesting post, Neo. That’s a lot more detail than I have seen anywhere else.
Based on the Google work environment presented in the James Damore lawsuit, Google has been encouraging its employees to blur their work and personal lives for years.
* * *
MB on November 3, 2018 at 5:41 am at 5:41 am said:
These people are are trying to take over the company.
This is a sensible (prison?) tactic: pick someone powerful and give him a public beatdown. Every Google manager and executive will be afraid of them. Even if they don’t succeed this time, this is a serious show of strength and they can try again next time. Also, this strengthens their position and now they can’t be fired, because it would be a form of retaliation….
And the Google chiefs deserve it, for having fallen for all the PC stuff, like diversity and hiring underrepresented groups. These people are the diversity hires and their left-wing allies who pushed for their hiring in the first place.
They have made their bed, now let them lie in it.
* * *
Tatterdemalian on November 3, 2018 at 12:31 am at 12:31 am said:
“I don’t believe in cutting a great road in the law to get after the ‘devil.’”
Neither do I, but nor do I think one can defend an implacable enemy to death. From the French Revolution to the Chavez Revolution, leftists have proven completely incapable of admitting they made any mistakes, let alone learning from them. They’ve burned their hands on the socialist fire to the point they’re cauterized at the armpits, yet still try to force other people to do the same because “it MUST work, once everyone else’s arms are burned off too.”
They can’t learn, but they can catch individuals off guard and alone and overwhelm them one by one. Slowly they will win the war of attrition, if we don’t fight back, at least by forcing the leftists to suffer and die under laws just as unlivable as the laws they would inflict upon the rest of us.
* * *
“Churchill: “Madam, would you sleep with me for five million pounds?” Socialite: “My goodness, Mr. Churchill… Well, I suppose… we would have to discuss terms, of course… ”
Churchill: “Would you sleep with me for five pounds?”
Socialite: “Mr. Churchill, what kind of woman do you think I am?!” Churchill: “Madam, we’ve already established that. Now we are haggling about the price”
Moneyrunner on November 3, 2018 at 6:41 am at 6:41 am said:
The late, great Tom Wolfe wrote about this very thing in 2000. It’s his book called “Hooking Up” and gets into the Silicon Valley culture. It includes the fanatical devotion to technological innovation, the all-encompassing lifestyle that practically encouraged work-related sexual encounters, the divorce and “intramarriage” where you shed your wife for a co-worker in the industry.
And now the #metoo fad has emerged to bite the big swinging dicks who screwed and abandoned too many lovers. And, Neo, none of them are victims. The men who betrayed their marriage vows and the women who just wanted to have fun … and a better job in return for sex, a commodity that never ran out.
* * *
Don’t totally agree on the none — some women really don’t want to put out to get ahead — but many who do/did, and now see a better deal in being victims, are poisoning the well for the genuinely abused.
* * *
Alec Rawls on November 3, 2018 at 4:15 am at 4:15 am said:
50% chance the “coercion” was him saying: “If you don’t want to have sex I’ll find a woman who does.”
50% it was him saying: “If you don’t want to have sex you’ll have to find a new sugardaddy.”
Either way it’s not coercion or harrassment. It is just negotiating the terms of a voluntary relationship, a more specifically prostitutional relationship in the latter case, but fully voluntary in either case.
* * *
“Churchill: “Madam, would you sleep with me for five million pounds?” Socialite: “My goodness, Mr. Churchill… Well, I suppose… we would have to discuss terms, of course… ”
Churchill: “Would you sleep with me for five pounds?”
Socialite: “Mr. Churchill, what kind of woman do you think I am?!”
Churchill: “Madam, we’ve already established that. Now we are haggling about the price”
Let’s try this one again. Got that last quote on the wrong comment.
Lizzy on November 3, 2018 at 7:01 am at 7:01 am said:
Based on the Google work environment presented in the James Damore lawsuit, Google has been encouraging its employees to blur their work and personal lives for years.
* * *
MB on November 3, 2018 at 5:41 am at 5:41 am said:
These people are are trying to take over the company.
This is a sensible (prison?) tactic: pick someone powerful and give him a public beatdown. Every Google manager and executive will be afraid of them. Even if they don’t succeed this time, this is a serious show of strength and they can try again next time. Also, this strengthens their position and now they can’t be fired, because it would be a form of retaliation….
And the Google chiefs deserve it, for having fallen for all the PC stuff, like diversity and hiring underrepresented groups. These people are the diversity hires and their left-wing allies who pushed for their hiring in the first place.
They have made their bed, now let them lie in it.
* * *
Tatterdemalian on November 3, 2018 at 12:31 am at 12:31 am said:
“I don’t believe in cutting a great road in the law to get after the ‘devil.’”
Neither do I, but nor do I think one can defend an implacable enemy to death. From the French Revolution to the Chavez Revolution, leftists have proven completely incapable of admitting they made any mistakes, let alone learning from them. …
They can’t learn, but they can catch individuals off guard and alone and overwhelm them one by one. Slowly they will win the war of attrition, if we don’t fight back, at least by forcing the leftists to suffer and die under laws just as unlivable as the laws they would inflict upon the rest of us.
* * *
Metaphorical death, of course, for those SJWs watching for “inciting to violence” offenses.
The take-down of Damore was the trial run to see if Google would support free and open discussion, or sham diversity only, and they learned from that, at least.
The same thing was done at the universities: the presidents and faculty that didn’t back down aren’t having as many problems as the ones that did, to the point where they can’t even administer their own campuses now without a Political Officer looking over their shoulders all the time (and some of them want it that way…).
The colleges might hang on quite a while, since they are milking the public’s cows and have no real accountability for anything, but if you are letting the insane people run your business asylum, you are not going to last in the long run.
Still, there is a lot of ruin in a trillion dollar company.
* * *
MikeK on November 3, 2018 at 11:33 am at 11:33 am said:
Soon, no important decision will be taken at Google without considering the “social ramifications” and “impact on marginalized groups”. Some diversity experts are about to land their dream job. Google is extremely rich and all ripe for plunder.
The “Diversity” thing is going to kill them off. If they drive away the “nerds” it will go faster.
I’m reading “Life after Google.”
* *
I haven’t read that yet, but I try to remind myself that — although it seems like we can’t possibly do without the search engines and email and so forth, the companies to which we have mortgaged our lives are all younger than my youngest child who works there (and I hope will continue to do so until at least the house is paid for).
“The Google company was officially launched in 1998 by Larry Page and Sergey Brin to market Google Search, which has become the most widely used web-based search engine. Page and Brin, students at Stanford University in California, developed a search algorithm – at first known as “BackRub” – in 1996. “
Bistro on November 2, 2018 at 11:18 pm at 11:18 pm said:
The women have jumped the shark. I never bought into the believe the woman angle because I was put into the position of judge/jury and executioner a time or two. In the absence of compelling evidence, I will always default to no harm/no foul. Then I will move to separate the two so they never work together again and if that means transferring one to another command, that’s what happens. I usually transferred the one I could most afford to lose. Guess which one that was.
Sadly, not happening in the world today, where the admin is on the side of the shark-tank.
* * *
a bee ee? on November 3, 2018 at 5:14 am at 5:14 am said:
Having myself once come close to losing my job because She Said So, I think it’s important to step back and recognize that, unfortunately, there’s no right to “due process” in the corporate world or academia in situations like this. The best thing men can do is to avoid working or attending school at such places, and publicize on line the most egregious among them.
* * *
Lots of intersecting commentary, but I would like to see how long it takes for the “burned nerds” to coalesce in a new, non-woke business enterprise.
Lizzy: “Employees are encouraged to date other Google employees.”
I am not in the least surprised, if this is true. As far as I can tell, Google’s entire strategy is to have the employees never need to leave the campus. Thus all the freebies — chefs at the cafeteria, massage therapists, 20% of your time on personal projects, etc.
I get an email from a Google recruiter every few months and if I answer them it’s with “thanks but no thanks” — I don’t think I’m the kind of engineer they would really hire anyway, but even if they were I would have too high a tendency to have an existence outside the company.
The “ownership” thing is closer to literal than you’d think.
There are a fair number of people out there for whom “dominance” and “submission” are an all-encompassing subculture. “Doms” use a mixture of rewards and mindgames to gain psychological control over “subs”, formalizing that sort of relationship. The “sub” is persuaded that being (in effect) a slave is good for him (or her). It needn’t involve outright physical bondage or sadomasochism. The sub devotes himself to proving how completely loyal and submissive he is.
For a parallel, consider the Japanese cult of a samurai’s unquestioning loyalty to the ruler or in older days, the lord. If the lord was callous or even abusive, that merely emphasized the virtue of loyalty to him. (Which has an odd parallel in the Gilbert & Sullivan operetta Patience; or Bunthorne’s Bride: the heroine, Patience, is told that true love must be completely unselfish. Therefore she commits to loving the poet Bunthorne, whom she finds repulsive (and he is; but she finds a much nicer poet).
A potential “sub” can be persuaded of the “virtue” of complete surrender to a “dom”.
A wealthy and powerful man like Rubin has a lot of advantages he can use to “enthrall” (literally) a target.
Leftists/Communists believe corporations are tools of Capitalist oppression and enemies of humanity. I hear this rhetoric nearly every day, either in person or on movies and TV. Then Leftists work for corporations whose excessive indulgence would embarrass pre-revolutionary French nobles.
Rightists believe the beneficiaries of society—its wealthy and its educated—should defend society, then are astonished when college-educated student join Red Brigades and when corporate heads support Communism.
The delusions of both exacerbate the current social and economic situation. Leftists must push towards ever-greater destruction and wokeness, else for what is their privilege? While Rightists plead and implore for the educated and wealthy to protect what’s good.
Both will fail.
It is time both lived in reality: Leftists within giant, wealthy, international corporations should be encouraged to live by their ideals and to destroy those companies, that we all might learn from reality.
Rightists should use recognize their enemies and strike accordingly: use the power of government to crack down on anti-social corporations, and strip woke graduates of their positions and degrees.
To AesopFan: too many posts, I stopped reading them. I count nine in a row, above. Perhaps I missed a few good points, but the repetition is exhausting. I’m sure that is not what you want, but it is the effect produced on this reader and on many others, I would bet. A word to the wise?
Kai – sometimes I just don’t have anyone else to talk to, especially late at night. Take what you like and skip the rest.
Aesop — Or didn’t you mean, I should go jump in a lake! LOL. Everyone has times with no one to talk to, I’m afraid. But the garrulousness is standard operating procedure for your posting. I wouldn’t have brought it up if it didn’t seem like it affects the threads at times.