The Voice of Google
I started working at Google in the summer of 2007, straight out of college, as a “new-grad associate” in the communications department. My first week, I sat with more than a hundred other “Nooglers” (new Googlers) at the company’s weekly staff meeting, T.G.I.F., wearing matching company-issued propeller caps as a kind of ritual hazing. The venue was Charlie’s Cafe, a multilevel auditorium in the heart of the “Googleplex,” the company’s sprawling campus in Mountain View, California. The event felt less like a corporate meeting than like a weekly revival—part standup set, part science fair, part sermon, all of it fuelled by keg beer.
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.
That first meeting was the only one I’d ever attend as a pure spectator. By week two, I was working the event—cordoning off the Noogler section, handing out extra caps—and I soon began helping to draft bits of Larry and Sergey’s script. A portion of my time was spent supporting the P.R. team, and I started to pick up my first press requests, providing office tours to journalists eager to see the “Google experience” firsthand. I studied a “master workplace talking points” document, which was maintained with input from PeopleOps, which was Google-speak for human resources. This was the era of “bringing your whole self to work,” of shiny, smiling H.R. people doing press hits about the importance of valuing employees’ authentic personhood (always with a telling corollary: “Because that’s how people do their best work!”). I was required to attend a training on “conscious business” with a guy named Fred Kofman, an executive coach whom Sheryl Sandberg credited with shaping her “lean-in” ethos. The course was, theoretically, about living one’s courageous values, but its most salient lesson was that employees should take “unconditional accountability”—which, in practice, sounded a lot like never questioning the higher-ups. The message reiterated over and over was that there were two kinds of people in the world: victims and players. You wanted to be a player at all times.
Despite the lore, Google’s offices didn’t make a big first impression. The bulk of the campus had been quickly converted after its previous occupant went down in the fallout from the dot-com bust. The result was a complex of squat, one- or two-level buildings with metal and glass siding, surrounded by a moat of parking spaces, with Google signs plunked into the dirt out front. But there were plenty of amenities to point out—the massage rooms and nap pods, the dinosaur fossil, the wacky sensory-break touches like ball pits, swings, and yoga balls (even if no one actually seemed to use them). Foreign journalists seemed more skeptical than their American counterparts of perks such as lunch-break haircuts or on-site laundry rooms, which I’d heard described as letting Google be your “housewife.”
“Z is is all a big plot to control ze workers, no?” a French reporter said.
At that point, though, I was still learning to see Google through Google’s eyes. I learned to deflect these kinds of questions and pitied the askers, a little bit, for their cynicism.
Over the following years, Google began broadcasting T.G.I.F. meetings to far-flung buildings across the Mountain View campus, and to an ever-growing constellation of satellite offices across the U.S. and around the world. Each week, we prepared a “prebrief” for Larry, Sergey, and the rest of the executive team, listing hot topics at the company that might come up during the Q. & A., and suggested talking points. I’d trawl internal e-mail lists to see what issues were getting Googlers riled up that week—Maps redesigns, Gmail-spam hiccups, price-hikes at the company’s on-site day care, management’s attempt to engineer healthy eating by moving the M&M jars. If an issue was really controversial, it might spawn a “centrithread,” with at least a hundred replies. My work became not just watching the Zeitgeist within the company but learning how to contain it—reading through messages, distilling the emotional temperature, and crafting executive responses meant to absorb shock and restore calm.
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.”
This voice-of-Google thing—a code I’d cracked for generating corpspeak with personality—slowly became a hot commodity. The company relied heavily on the rhetoric of “culture” to keep tens of thousands of workers energized, giving a hundred and ten per cent. If work was going to be like a family, then it had to sound like one—maximally friendly, quirky, virtuous, Googley. So, in early 2011, when Larry Page became the C.E.O., replacing the veteran tech executive Eric Schmidt, I was looped in to help craft Larry’s internal messaging.
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.
Larry reorganized the company around a handful of key priorities, the biggest being that every product at Google should become “social.” He tied twenty-five per cent of employees’ annual bonuses to the company’s success in pushing this agenda. Hundreds of handpicked engineers, a clear first-class citizenry, were moved into a secretive, newly renovated building in Mountain View. A lush living wall, said to boost brainpower and creativity, reinforced the sense that the workplace itself had been engineered to optimize human potential. Meanwhile, Larry’s examples of how to implement his vision were utterly banal. The centerpiece of his plan was a new social-media network, code-named Emerald Sea, that would eventually launch as Google+. It was a defensive move, not an inspiring vision—Google worried that newer upstarts, like Facebook and Twitter, would steal our enormous internet lunch and become everyone’s portal to the web. Google+ was supposed to help us really “know” our users, which, in turn, would help us better target them with advertising. It wouldn’t be long before, say, Google Maps could serve you up a coupon right when you walked into your local CVS. This was groundbreaking stuff—a vision that ceding all of one’s personal data to Google would really feel worth it. The stock price went up and up and up.
There were signs that Google was becoming bloated and inefficient, with multiple teams, for example, working on smartwatches simultaneously, as Googlers pointed out at one T.G.I.F. (In the end, none of these attempts could best the Apple Watch.) Larry said, blithely, that chasing the competition was a death knell, and yet that seemed to be all that we were doing. “We need to put more wood behind fewer arrows,” he often said, regurgitating an old Valley maxim. The trouble was, the arrows kept multiplying—appearing from nowhere, whizzing in every direction—and even Larry couldn’t seem to contain them.
Google+ was a short-lived flop, but the spin was relentless. The platform had hit ten million users just two weeks after an invitation-only launch, Larry boasted. By the fall, the number was forty million, and by early 2012 more than twice that. What Larry didn’t say was that many of those “users” had been been virtually forced to create accounts when they signed up for other Google services. The engagement numbers were dismal. When the platform was sunsetted, in 2018, Google admitted that the average Google+ user spent less than five seconds on the platform per visit. The place was a graveyard of auto-populated profiles, a digital Potemkin village.
In the crusade to make everything social, Google ended up destroying one of the few genuinely social things it had ever made: the RSS-feed aggregator Google Reader. Reader wasn’t glamorous, but it had a passionate following. It was small, by Google standards (and only by Google standards), with a reported thirty million or so users, many of whom were active daily. It was, by far, my favorite Google product, the one place I actually “socialized” online; I used it every day to read stuff on the web, share links, commiserate with friends. I saw a Googler on Hacker News say that the killing of Reader was the “Elves leave Middle-Earth” moment. Memegen was flooded with snark: We can bankroll a delusional moon shot to beam internet from balloons (Project Loon), but we can’t keep a few engineers on this?
My own growing skepticism started to bleed into my T.G.I.F. e-mails. The messages started coming out half liturgy, half parody, depending on how you looked at it:
Rumors of relationships between executives and underlings went around on campus. One of my first summers, on the Marina shuttle line, I heard about an employee who was visibly pregnant. She’d slept with one of the big sales executives and she was super-religious, it was said; she grew more and more pregnant, then disappeared. I asked around to see whether anyone knew what had happened to her—crickets. At a work event in New York, for a short-lived visual search engine that Google was trying to build in the “fashion space,” an executive I’d been ghostwriting for suddenly asked me, apropos of nothing, “Have you heard any rumors about me?” “Sure,” I replied. I’d heard some rumors about him having dalliances on the sales team when he’d worked in the London office. “I challenge you to come up with one name,” he said. We were up against the bar of the venue, and he gripped me around the waist with one hand. I could feel all five fingers clasping me, and I withered. Even as his hand seemed to confirm everything I’d heard, I lost my grip on the gossip, suddenly unable to imagine naming names or defending what I’d said. “Let me get you a drink,” he said. It was a command, not a question, so I whispered, “Vodka soda.” When someone else finally walked over (Bless you, networking stranger!) I slipped away and sprinted out the door.
There were other ways that the company’s power structures, and my own precarious place within them, began to come into focus. In the summer of 2012, I transferred to work at Creative Lab, a coveted New York-based studio that produced some of Google’s major ads. My boss there, Kevin, dressed like a little kid—T-shirt, cargo shorts, low-top sneakers—and had a boyish crew cut to match. The only tipoffs that he was pushing forty were a sallow, hangdog facial expression and Nosferatu-esque under-eye bags. He used the word “shit” a lot: We just make shit. We do epic shit. During our first and only meeting before I was hired, he barely discussed me, my work, or how he envisioned that I might fit into the Lab, though he did say, with a perceptible note of admiration, “You clearly get the Googley shit.” I was an emissary from, or maybe a totem of, Mountain View, and that gave me some currency. But once I was in the job he didn’t bother to train me. “Just read up on the Lab and watch all the videos again,” he said. He’d find something for me to do eventually.
A cocky freelancer, a buddy of Kevin’s from another agency, started soon after I did and was immediately handed important projects. He effortlessly cracked Kevin’s shell, bringing out a goofy, relaxed side of him I’d never once seen. The two laughed and joked constantly, and lip-synched to the song of the year, Carly Rae Jepsen’s “Call Me Maybe,” as an afternoon energy boost. I remember running into him, a month into the job, in the snack kitchen, and him remarking, “Oh, I forgot you existed,” before shuffling off to his next meeting. When I asked a co-worker for advice about how to persuade Kevin to “put me in the game,” he shrugged and said that Kevin was a “guy’s guy,” who liked working with the kind of dude he could get a beer with after work.
The bulk of the creatives at the Lab were men. There were plenty of women, but they were mostly slotted into supporting roles—managing budgets, spreadsheets, and schedules, making the machine run. A female exec, the head of production, left soon after I arrived, and there wasn’t a single female creative director the entire time I was there. A top executive was asked about this once in an all-hands meeting. He offered some vague lip service about how the Lab was such a unicorn-magic kind of place that they needed to be “extra sure” that anyone they hired—read: any woman—would be set up to succeed. This was framed as sage judgment, and we dutifully nodded along. Who could argue with the logic of meritocracy? I was close to quitting when I saw an e-mail from a Google internal recruiter: YouTube, now owned by Google, was having trouble filling a position on the marketing team, and they thought I’d be a great fit.
My title at YouTube was “curation strategy manager,” but YouTube was not a curated place. It was wild, endless, untamable. In earlier eras, the site had more “home page editorial,” dedicated sections in which editors chose interesting things to spotlight. But YouTube had long since learned that algorithms could do a better job picking videos to squeeze the longest “total watch time” out of every user. As best as I could understand it, we curator-managers were there to add a human component to the algorithm, helping to shape it with our insights about what made for good content. Our team had a shared project with Engineering, basically an infinite computer-generated playlist. The machine trawled the site, surfacing the most popular content and filtering out anything risqué, and then we topped up the offerings with whatever might have been missed. My boss, another Kevin, directed me away from YouTube, to Twitter, Reddit, and Digg, to see which YouTube videos were popping up that day. The exercise was largely fruitless: it was genuinely hard to find things that the machine hadn’t caught.
Kevin had given a TED Talk called “Why Videos Go Viral” that garnered a lot of attention from YouTube management, and he was settling into a regular gig as a company spokesman. He was a deft summarizer of internet memes and phenomena: “Gangnam Style,” Keyboard Cat, “Charlie bit my finger”—YouTube’s oldest, least controversial hits. He was dimpled and telegenic, with a confident, know-it-all way of talking about internet trends. He said that he’d invented the genre of the political supercut video, a claim both difficult to verify and completely on-brand. In media appearances, his main talking point was “YouTube is changing the world”; he was writing a book proposal about it. He built this narrative by stringing together crazy outlier examples: Justin Bieber getting discovered after his mom started uploading videos of him singing; a guy in Africa who taught himself the javelin from YouTube videos, and later won an Olympic medal.
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?”
Social media was emerging as a major discipline within marketing, a development that the executives of the company didn’t really understand but which they knew was crucial to the “YouTube generation.” In 2015, YouTube’s social-media manager left abruptly to launch a career as an L.G.B.T.Q.+/mental-health activist/influencer (a very 2015 career pivot), and I was offered the job. At that time, YouTube’s social-media presence consisted of a handful of Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook posts a day, written and deployed by an agency, at arm’s length. My new boss, a British woman named Marion, stressed to me, during our first lunch, that there was a lot of opportunity to expand our reach, because “YouTube is the biggest brand in the world on social.” I would hear Marion say that YouTube was the biggest brand in the world on social at least a thousand times in the next five years. It was technically true: Twitter had long recommended YouTube’s account to new users during sign-up, and so the platform’s profile had amassed tens of millions of followers, placing it up there with the pages of Taylor Swift and Barack Obama.
Marion asked me to take the lead on writing a “megadeck” about our strategy and socializing it (pun, unfortunately, intended) within the org. It was hard to pinpoint a tangible return-on-investment in social media: despite our fifty or so million followers on Twitter, tweets drove negligible traffic back to YouTube; platforms like Instagram drove no traffic at all, and much of our engagement was from spammers or bots. But the marketing jargon flowed from me with ease. We were the voice of the brand, I wrote, “driving love and building trust with our community” and “shaping the daily conversation around YouTube.” When it was time to come up with a single mission statement for our work, I channelled the loftiness of Creative Lab and Larry Page, my whole career building up to this moment: “We remind the world what it loves about YouTube.” Marion thought it was brilliant.
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.
The social-media team’s supposed grip on the public narrative about the brand had always been tenuous. YouTube was too big, too volatile, too gravitational; it pulled in billions of eyeballs a day, no matter how we managed the optics. Our whole mandate—shape the daily conversation, boost brand love, remind the world why it loves us—now felt almost delusional.
In July, 2017, while I was out on maternity leave after the birth of my first son, a twenty-eight-year-old software engineer named James Damore posted a ten-page memo, titled “Google’s Ideological Echo Chamber,” to an internal forum called skeptics@google.com. In it, citing a range of psychological studies and Wiki pages, he argued that women are underrepresented in the tech industry not because of systemic inequity but because of their innate biological differences from men—their “stronger interest in people rather than things,” their propensity for “neuroticism,” their “higher levels of anxiety.” He criticized the company’s diversity initiatives as discriminatory and futile, and advanced “concrete suggestions” for improving them: “de-moralize diversity,” “de-emphasize empathy,” “stop alienating Conservatives.” Empathy is dangerous, he said: “Being emotionally unengaged helps us better reason about the facts.” The memo created a firestorm within Google, and Damore was soon terminated. The alt-right immediately held him up as a hero, and he did interviews with stars of the nascent “manosphere” such as Joe Rogan and Jordan Peterson. (He later sued Google, though he eventually dismissed the claim, and he now reportedly lives in a castle in Luxembourg.)
A few months later the Harvey Weinstein story broke, and #MeToo stories flooded social media. But there were foreshocks already, especially in the tech industry. A woman named Susan Fowler had gone viral earlier that year with a post detailing a culture of harassment and discrimination at Uber, and the Times had published a story about female entrepreneurs being propositioned by investors during the funding or recruiting process. Then, in October, 2018, the paper published a bombshell report on Google’s handling of sexual-misconduct allegations against Andy Rubin, the Android founder turned Google executive. Google had found one of the claims credible, the Times said, but instead of kicking Rubin out they’d quietly negotiated a ninety-million-dollar exit package. (Rubin denied misconduct and claimed that he’d left of his own accord.) The piece named another executive who’d received similar treatment after a sexual-misconduct allegation against him was found credible, and reported on other cases of male higher-ups having relationships with employees or job applicants, including one consensual affair that led to the woman being pushed out while the man remained at the company, accruing hundreds of millions of dollars in equity.
As soon as the story broke, I checked the online discussion groups to see what Google staffers were saying. An anonymous, super-active mom group that I followed was usually full of practical, nerdy engineers crunching data on their kids’ eating and sleeping patterns, or synthesizing the latest studies about boosting baby brains. But the Rubin story unearthed something new. A mom started a thread to discuss the revelations, and women began sharing stories about what they’d witnessed or endured working in the boys’ club of Big Tech. One recounted a tragicomic anecdote from a T.G.I.F. meeting on International Women’s Day, when a Googler had asked Larry and Sergey to name some of their personal female heroes. Larry apparently chose Ruth Porat, the C.F.O., who was with him onstage; Sergey struggled to come up with anyone until Larry helped him land on Gloria Steinem.
At the next T.G.I.F., Larry apologized for the “painful” Rubin story and spoke vaguely about how he would have made different decisions in hindsight, but he refused to address the payout directly. Sundar Pichai, who’d succeeded Larry as C.E.O., said “we want to get better,” and the head of H.R., Eileen Naughton, said that the company had made improvements to its policies. Then the meeting moved on to address normal product updates. “Weak ass TGIF response,” someone in the mom group wrote. Someone else said: “Anyone else feeling *personally* humiliated to be spending their limited hours on this planet to enrich men like this?” This wasn’t how Googlers talked. We’d been conditioned to be optimistic and trusting of leadership. Grateful. Always players, never victims. Another woman in the thread said she was going to write an e-mail to Sundar. Several more chimed in that they would, too.
I knew, from my time in the communications department, that this wasn’t enough. Individual complaints were too easy to metabolize, to redirect into the bureaucracy. So I wrote back: “We’re at a deep pivot moment where MeToo, the backlash against tech’s money/power, and just general societal unrest collide. . . . I wonder how we can use our collective leverage. . . . If we banded together, what could we do? A walkout, a strike, an open letter to Sundar?”
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.
Late on Monday, BuzzFeed broke the news that women at Google were planning a walkout. We got another big P.R. boost from the company itself, when Sundar sent an e-mail that night. “Some of you have raised very constructive ideas for how we can improve our policies and our processes going forward . . . I’m taking in all of your feedback so we can turn these ideas into action.” H.R. would make managers aware of the event we’d planned, he said, and insure that we had the support we needed. It was classic P.R. jujitsu—absorbing the language of dissent to neutralize it.
I used every skill I’d honed over a decade of managing Google’s optics: drafting comms, coördinating with press, coaching speakers behind the scenes. The Times described how “Google was struggling to contain a growing internal backlash.” New York ran a piece co-signed by our core team: “We’re the Organizers of the Google Walkout. Here Are Our Demands.” Hundreds of people had left comments and edits in a shared Google Doc, and we’d whittled them down to five points, including a commitment to end pay inequity and an improved process for reporting sexual misconduct.
By sunrise, it was clear that the walkout was going to be huge. It took place at 11:10 A.M. local time in every location. In Dublin, London, Zurich, Tokyo, and Hamburg, people streamed from the offices, and the press was everywhere. The event started trending on Twitter. At YouTube, we were always trying to manufacture moments like this—with sprawling brand campaigns, enormous budgets, and a labyrinth of agencies all straining to make something trend, break through, go viral. We almost never pulled it off. And now here it was, unfolding organically.
The possibility of retaliation from Google was a frequent topic of discussion among the walkout’s organizing group. The Tech Workers Coalition, a new industry advocacy group, had launched a hotline for Googlers, and legal nonprofits had reached out to offer their support and services. But the walkout took place at a strange, fleeting moment when corporations like Google wanted to align themselves with the #resistance. Even Porat, Google’s top-ranking woman, had participated in the protest, and when asked about it a couple of weeks later, at a Wall Street Journal conference, she framed it as emblematic of a culture that welcomed employees using their voices to “percolate up” issues. “We had Googlers do what Googlers do well,” she said. “If you can get cars to self-drive, and if you can solve all the problems that we’re solving through technology, why can’t we solve this?” A few weeks after the walkout, during an off-site retreat for YouTube’s social-media team, Marion, my boss, asked me to give a presentation sharing my “learnings” from coördinating the action. Afterward, she nudged a deputy, who reached under the table and furnished a pair of white Doc Martens. “We wanted to give you something to commemorate your activism,” Marion said.
The moment of institutional self-congratulation was brief. In January, news broke that a flank of shareholders was suing the board of Alphabet, Google’s parent company, over the handling of the Rubin affair. The lawsuit, which Alphabet later settled, attacked the board on both ethical and fiduciary grounds, saying that its “culture of concealment” was harming the company and that the actions it had taken so far, post-walkout, were “reactive” and “insufficient.” The suit also surfaced some juicy new tidbits, chiefly that Larry Page had personally approved a hundred-and-fifty-million-dollar stock grant for Rubin while the sexual-harassment investigation was under way, and that another exec had received an exit payout as large as forty-five million dollars. That day, some of the core walkout group hammered out a statement: “Anyone who enables abuse, harassment and discrimination must be held accountable, and those with the most power have the most to account for.” The Times ran an excerpt of it with their story about the suit. It was published just before I logged on to a one-on-one meeting with Marion.
Marion was based in the Bay Area, in the San Bruno offices, but she’d been in London visiting family for the holidays. Appearing onscreen, her face close to the computer, and the background all fuzzy, she told me that she’d had a think over the break, and that she’d decided to reorganize the team. A member who had reported to me would now become my peer and take over “daily social,” the stream of content that had been my core responsibility. Marion was also hiring a new lead above me, meaning that I would no longer report directly to her. In short, my job was being gutted overnight. I ended the call as quickly as I could, too stunned to respond.
The next day, I wrote to Marion making the case for keeping my role as it was. She replied quickly, stating that the reorganization would go ahead regardless, so I decided to reach out to our department’s H.R. person. She told me that she couldn’t help, because the marketing department had recently switched to a new human-resources model, and H.R. staff members like her now served only directors. If employees lower down in the hierarchy had an issue, we’d have to file a ticket on an internal network, and someone would be assigned from a centralized H.R. hub to manage it.
I went ahead and filed a ticket, mostly out of curiosity about how this automated system would process a serious claim. In a “Please describe your issue” box (two hundred and fifty characters allotted), I wrote that I’d organized the Google walkout and now my boss was demoting me out of nowhere, which seemed like textbook retaliation for labor organizing. It took a couple of days for anyone to respond, and a few more before I met, over video, with a young H.R. representative. I told him my story, and he worked methodically through a script of generic solutions. If I was having challenges with my manager, I should consider inviting her out for coffee or an activity—some quality time outside the office to rebuild the relationship. I could take advantage of the company’s internal mindfulness and self-care resources, or take some P.T.O. to relax, because working at Google could be pretty demanding!
As coverage of the walkout continued, more stories about Google’s culture began to surface. I spoke to New York about my experience at Creative Lab, and, not long afterward, Lorraine Twohill, Google’s chief marketing officer—my boss’s boss’s boss’s boss—reached out. She offered to connect me with a senior H.R. rep named Suzanne, who, in turn, referred me to someone named Julie on the benefits team. By that point I was considering taking time off, to figure out a next step—a transfer to a different team in marketing, perhaps, or to a different org within Alphabet—but I was surprised when Julie clicked through slides explaining medical leave. Why was I being treated as a sick person? I had cried in the meeting with Suzanne, explaining how crushed I’d felt by the retaliation, but the company’s narrative seemed to be that I was having a mental breakdown.
The next day, when Suzanne followed up to ask whether I’d considered the options she’d suggested, I told her that I was seeking outside counsel. I’d been in touch with a labor lawyer, and we began drafting a demand letter. Before we could send it, Marion’s boss called me and said that I could keep my responsibilities after all. On paper, my job was restored. I still ran the social-media accounts, my little team, a daily meeting. But Marion barely spoke to me. I was treated like an interloper on the team. Whenever I was looped into things, it was by someone other than Marion. Sometimes, it felt like I was being trolled. For International Women’s Day, a peer asked me to “amplify” a campaign celebrating the “strength and resilience” of women. I directed our agency to add lots of heart emojis to our tweets.
Another organizer of the walkout, Meredith, had also had her role diminished. In April, we convened with other organizers on a video chat and decided it was time for a new labor action, this time focussed on retaliation. For me, this wasn’t so much a decision as a recognition that my career at Google was over. Meredith and I sent a letter to the entire walkout list, describing what we’d experienced. By afternoon, the Times had published a breaking headline: “Google Employees Say They Faced Retaliation After Organizing Walkout.”
Google’s lawyer and mine began exit negotiations. At T.G.I.F. the week that I left, during the Q. & A., a top question was about my departure: “Claire Stapleton, a legend in Google culture, is leaving because of retaliation and mistreatment. Is the fact that employees barely trust H.R. not considered an issue?” Eileen, the head of H.R., delivered the corporate line, which was that the company had investigated my concerns and found no retaliation. It was my decision to leave, she said, and they respected that decision. The company had also denied retaliating against Meredith. A decade earlier, I might have drafted some version of their tidy talking points. Now my own messy, inconvenient story had been absorbed and neutralized. The next day, escorted by an H.R. representative, I turned in my badge, laptop, and phone, and walked out of the office for the last time.
The retaliation worked. Most of the walkout’s broad base got the message that the era of sanctioned dissent was over. If you wanted to keep your job, it was time to stick to the script, not that that would be any guarantee: in 2023, Google laid off some twelve thousand people, representing around six per cent of its workforce, and, in the years that followed, an estimated four hundred thousand jobs were eliminated across tech. For a while, Google tried to maintain its two faces. Lorraine, Google’s chief marketing officer, pontificated at conferences and in op-eds about building diverse, inclusive teams. Sundar instituted a company-wide moment of silence after George Floyd was murdered by police, and the company said that it was donating a hundred-and-seventy-five-million-dollars to support Black businesses and entrepreneurs. Then Trump was reëlected, and the mask slipped in an instant. At the Inauguration, Sundar and Sergey sat behind the President alongside Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, and Jeff Bezos. Google, like many companies, slashed mentions of “inclusion” and “equity” on its websites and ended its diversity hiring targets. Sergey was named to Trump’s White House tech council and dined at Mar-a-Lago with, in the President’s words, his “wonderful MAGA girlfriend.”
Lately, the Creative Lab seems to have a new assignment, to make Google’s aggressive push into artificial intelligence look as friendly as possible. The ads that the company has been putting out to promote its A.I. capabilities are sugary and surreal: sloths and raccoons doing kick flips on skateboards; phones turning into vanilla ice-cream cones, set to twee music that sounds like it belongs in a Wes Anderson movie. The broader goal is simple: if the company’s A.I. feels maximally whimsical, nonthreatening, and emotionally intelligent—Googley—you’ll let it deeper into your life. I’d be remiss not to note that, before it was rebranded as Gemini, Google’s A.I. chatbot was called Bard. ♦
This was drawn from “Don’t Be Evil: Bad Bosses, Fake Promises, and My Escape from Big Tech.”