{"id":177954,"date":"2019-04-22T18:43:00","date_gmt":"2019-04-22T23:43:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/2019\/04\/22\/being-evil-4\/"},"modified":"2019-04-22T18:43:00","modified_gmt":"2019-04-22T23:43:00","slug":"being-evil-4","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/2019\/04\/22\/being-evil-4\/","title":{"rendered":"Being Evil"},"content":{"rendered":"

The organizers of an employee walkout over Google’s plans to become in the Chinese state security apparatus are now saying that they are being retaliated against<\/a>.<\/p>\n

To paraphrase Ron Zeigler, Google’s whole, “Don’t be evil,” thing is now inoperative:<\/p>\n

Two employee activists at Google say they have been retaliated against for helping to organize a walkout<\/a> among thousands of Google workers in November, and are planning a \u201ctown hall\u201d meeting on Friday for others to discuss alleged instances of retaliation.<\/p>\n

In a message posted to many internal Google mailing lists Monday, Meredith Whittaker, who leads Google\u2019s Open Research, said that after the company disbanded its external AI ethics council<\/a> on April 4, she was told that her role would be \u201cchanged dramatically.\u201d Whittaker said she was told that, in order to stay at the company, she would have to \u201cabandon\u201d her work on AI ethics and her role at AI Now Institute, a research center she cofounded at New York University.<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Claire Stapleton, another walkout organizer and a 12-year veteran of the company, said in the email that two months after the protest she was told she would be demoted from her role as marketing manager at YouTube and lose half her reports. After escalating the issue to human resources, she said she faced further retaliation. \u201cMy manager started ignoring me, my work was given to other people, and I was told to go on medical leave, even though I\u2019m not sick,\u201d Stapleton wrote. After she hired a lawyer, the company conducted an investigation and seemed to reverse her demotion. \u201cWhile my work has been restored, the environment remains hostile and I consider quitting nearly every day,\u201d she wrote.<\/p>\n

Whittaker and Stapleton are two of the seven employees who helped organize the mass demonstration in November, during which 20,000 Google workers<\/a> briefly walked out of their office to protest the company\u2019s mishandling of sexual harassment claims.<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Seriously, if you think that any of the internet giants are any less psychopathic than Exxon, Enron, or IG Farben, you are sorely mistaken.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The organizers of an employee walkout over Google’s plans to become in the Chinese state security apparatus are now saying that they are being retaliated against. To paraphrase Ron Zeigler, Google’s whole, “Don’t be evil,” thing is now inoperative: Two employee activists at Google say they have been retaliated against for helping to organize a …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[365,364,367],"class_list":["post-177954","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","tag-business","tag-evil","tag-internet"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/177954"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=177954"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/177954\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=177954"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=177954"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=177954"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}