Across many countries and continents, the internet, and its main service provider, Google is a significant driver of progressive politics, opening the world’s eyes to the latest ideologies on collective and individual freedoms. Google too has always been vocal about the culture that is encouraged within the company: a culture of learning, discourse, and debate, a culture where employees are encouraged to treat their workplace like their college. There is a clear limit to the discourse that Google does entertain, however. On the 17th of April, Google took immediate action to fire 28 employees sitting in at protests at their locations in New York City, Seattle, and Sunnyvale. These employees had been protesting against the company’s controversial Project Nimbus.
Project Nimbus, which is an artificial intelligence and computing services agreement signed between Google and Israel, has been in effect since July 2021. The agreement grants the Israeli Ministry of Defence with its own ‘landing zone’ into Google Cloud. This landing zone is essentially a secure entry point for the Ministry to Google-provided computing infrastructure. This allows the MoD to both store and process its data on Google’s infrastructure, and access Google’s AI services. According to media reports, Google’s service agreement with Israel even gave the government a 15% discount on their consulting fees. This agreement sparked outrage among many netizens as well as the company’s own employees, following as it did reports of the Israeli government’s supposed use of AI assistance in selecting targets for air strikes on Gaza. Google and Amazon employees took to The Guardian, an independent publication, to voice their dissent of Google’s actions.
“We are writing as Google and Amazon employees of conscience from diverse backgrounds”, wrote dissenters in a letter published in The Guardian in October 2021. “We believe that the technology we build should work to serve and uplift people everywhere… As workers who keep these companies running, we are morally obligated to speak out against violations of these core values”. However, Google CEO Sundar Pichai believes that expressing dissent is an overstep on the part of his employees. He expressed these ideas in a blog post that detailed Google’s ongoing work on artificial intelligence on the 18th. The blog post made little to no difference to the Nimbus project or the protestations themselves, and rather focused on advising employees against introducing divisive politics into their workspace.
Sundar Pichai made his stance clear in his blog post titled ‘Mission first’, emphasising that Google – rather Google’s parent company Alphabet – primarily “is a business and not a place to act in a way that disrupts coworkers or makes them feel unsafe, to attempt to use the company as a personal platform, or to fight over disruptive issues or debate politics”. This statement may just have escaped criticism from most people if not for what followed: “This is too important a moment as a company for us to be distracted”. This statement naturally prompted the question of whether Google’s company-defining moment took precedence over the humanitarian issue that its employees were racing. Pichai’s request to protect the sanctity of the workplace as a safe place for all employees is now being called into question, as it entails compromising the safety of others.
Instead, Pichai’s blog post asks that everyone focus on Google’s real mission instead: to “organise the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful”. The impact of Google’s partnership with the Israeli government, and the Israeli’s alleged crimes against humanity on said universal accessibility is one nuanced element of the issue that the blogpost did not address. According to an internal memo circulated by Google’s head of security on the same day (the 18th), the protest alone is not what Google is objecting to, which is something that is left out of most discourse on the incident: the protestors had actually damaged company property in their activity. According to Rackow, the punitive steps that the company had taken largely appear to be punitive action against the employees ‘bringing in their event’ in Google premises in New York and Sunnyvale. These employers had allegedly ‘taken over office spaces, defaced company property, and physically impeded the work of other “Googlers”. The dismissal of the employees responsible is due to their actions violating company policies, including its Code of Conduct and Policy on Harassment, Discrimination, Retaliation, Standards of Conduct, and Workplace Concerns.
In addition to the dismissal of the 28 employees found to be involved with the incident, nine people had also been arrested on trespassing charges on the eve of the incident.
(Theruni M. Liyanage)