I think he/she is suggesting that project maven wasn't as bad as people made it out to be. It's unclear from the lack of context _why_ they think that.
Improved US Military Tech (sensors, communications, precision) can translate into less collateral damage in operations. These ops have been conducted under every president and will continue happening under future presidents, unless we go full isolationist. The issue isn't black and white.
Iraq invasion was initially welcomed by vast majority of iraqis and US were initially seen as the liberators. So "invading" is not the correct word to use because it was not seen as such by Iraqis.
And what is the state of Iraq right now? How many people have died just because some power hungry lunatic "was sure" that Iraq had WMD's?
What about Libya? What is the state of Libya? Let's not even get started on Afghanistan. Do you even know of Task force 47 in war of 1971 between India-Pakistan?
I'm not well versed in geo politics of Latin America but there have been cases over there as well where US would meddle in internal affairs of a country and overthrow a ruler.
We invaded on false pretense 'Weapons of Mass Destruction' if I recall - it was an invasion and ideally it should have been an effort driven by the UN instead of the Republican party of the USA.
Improved military technology in the area of sensors, precision, and communications (what Google was working on) actually reduces collateral damage and civilian deaths in ops that are going to happen regardless of hand-wringing.
Imagine how much worse things would be if technical progress stopped 70 years ago and the military only had battleship cannon fire and napalm firebombing at its disposal.
I imagine a direct implementation of "western style" democracy in China will cause a huge human right criss. There's no evidence democracy could ever scale to 1.4B people with a great portion of them in poverty still
I hope that between this and the defeat of Project Maven, Google employees are waking up to how much power they have when act collectively. Hopefully, more formal labor organization follows, so there can be an ongoing check on the poor, executive-level decision-making that keeps pushing the company into these unethical pursuits.
Not sure why you're being downvoted. This seems like an extremely reasonable statement to me. Ethics seem to not really be valued in many large tech companies anymore, as long as employee's can make large sums of money.
I’ll tell you why: because the op suggested labor unions. They are considered harmful because it’s switching to a centralized decision making process. Perhaps unions were beneficial in the past for workers with little to no education, but for the “highly educated” software engineers living in an age where information is easily available, maybe not so much.
How are unions a centralized decision-making process relative to companies that are ran like dictatorships by unelected executives? If anything, labor organization decentralizes decision-making and power within a company.
>For one labor unions represent people across all companies.
Not true, you can have a labor union for one company.
>one can deal/negotiate directly with companies individually.
Also not true, I have zero ability to deal/negotiate with my company and I'd say this is a period where workers actually have less rights and less ability to negotiate other than simply quitting which isn't really sustainable for many people since 80% of the country is living paycheck to paycheck [1]. As we approach full employment workers should be gaining more ability to negotiate, but it's not happening.
>Also, nothing is preventing one from founding a startup which elects its leaders democratically.
Lack of funding, lack of credit. This is always the 'easy answer' for capitalists 'just start your own company', but it's really not that easy.
> Not true, you can have a labor union for one company.
Yes, you can, but for all practical purposes I believe this would never happen, as it’s unsustainable. I mean, can you imagine every little startup or small company having their own union? I think the whole point of a union is to represent workers across the industry, unless you’re tied to a huge corporation, in which case it would make sense to have its own.
> Lack of funding, ...
So if starting a company ‘is not that easy’, why do people complain about companies being ran like dictatorships?
It seems that, despite the hardship, these “dictators” have managed to successfully bring something into existence and ought to exert more control over a company’s fate, don’t you think?
And for the sake of clarity, I’m not denying the huge contribution of early employees, just to be clear. I think they’re instrumental to any successful venture.
I’m not sure that ethics aren’t valued on an individual-level by tech employees, so much as they’re denied opportunities to coordinate and express them.
Google, because of historical quirks with its culture, has provided employees a platform to do this, if only in a limited form. And what we see there is workers using it to organize and impose change from the bottom-up.
They’ll probably soon realize the limits of acting without a parallel power structure, such as a union, when executive power crashes down on them to curb this growing rebellion. But like I said, I’m hopeful that all the very smart people at Google will come to understand their true class position as labor relative to management and build something more durable that can help put the company back on a better, more ethical track.
It's funny that it's only now that Google employees are developing a conscience. Advanced facial recognition systems, email harvesting, stalking people across the internet and monitoring their every keyboard press, many more drastic infringements on people's privacy under the guise of "they clicked accept on our 1000 page t&cs"...not a whimper.
I support anything that damages Google as an entity, or throws egg on the faces of those who choose to work for them, so this apparent revolution-of-conscience from within is pretty delightful to behold.
> It's funny that it's only now that Google employees are developing a conscience. Advanced facial recognition systems, email harvesting, stalking people across the internet and monitoring their every keyboard press, many more drastic infringements on people's privacy under the guise of "they clicked accept on our 1000 page t&cs"...not a whimper.
The difference is, things you listed have clear good/useful applications beyond the obvious problems, and employees may be less inclined to protest if they believe the company is working in good faith. In contrast, both the China situation and project Maven seem much more directly problematic.
> Advanced facial recognition systems, email harvesting, stalking people across the internet and monitoring their every keyboard press
These things have clear benefit to the user (face unlock and personal photo search, personal email search, search ranking, instant search). Adding yet another censored search engine in China does not.
You've been using HN primarily for political and ideological battle. That's an abuse of this site, and we ban accounts that do it, regardless of which politics they're blessing or smiting. The reason is that HN exists for intellectual curiosity, and these two phenomena don't go well together. Indeed, one destroys the other.
I would agree that staunch political alignment kills curiosity. To me, curiosity is a desire to learn and discover. You can’t learn if you’ve already made up your mind.
> Silicon Valley work forces are made mostly of first-generations from other cultures that are mostly not progressive in the Western sense. China, Korea, and Vietnam spent the last half of the 20th century either running from or killing communists. Some have had family involved. These potential Silicon Valley defectors, especially from Google, are fucking gold mines. Devs always keep a copy of code/db dumps. As the defectors pile up, they will bring more and more evidence of cyber phrenology. Silicon Valley will have its Snowden moment.
> As these efforts go into full swing and the defectors pile up, Silicon Valley will have to institute Scientology-style restrictions of expression and behavior. These limitations will only create more defectors as internal reprimands become more reactionary. If you need help finding the psychology of Silicon Valley developers, mine HackerNews and IRC logs for sentiment analysis about their behaviors and allegiances.
He even said he was going "make Google censor protected classes.":
It's interesting that this free exchange of ideas, and group dissent, inside of Google is exactly the power that the Chinese people lack over their own government. It really shows why the Chinese government is so afraid of it. And why it's so necessary as a tool for maintaining the ethics of a massive organization.
> Maybe Google has some plan how to actually undermine the censorship long term, but it seems that it must be quite a long shot.
There's no such plan. The Communist Party will kick them out faster than you can say "great firewall" if they took any action to undermine their censorship regime.
> Silicon Valley work forces are made mostly of first-generations from other cultures that are mostly not progressive in the Western sense. China, Korea, and Vietnam spent the last half of the 20th century either running from or killing communists. Some have had family involved. These potential Silicon Valley defectors, especially from Google, are fucking gold mines. Devs always keep a copy of code/db dumps. As the defectors pile up, they will bring more and more evidence of cyber phrenology. Silicon Valley will have its Snowden moment.
> As these efforts go into full swing and the defectors pile up, Silicon Valley will have to institute Scientology-style restrictions of expression and behavior. These limitations will only create more defectors as internal reprimands become more reactionary. If you need help finding the psychology of Silicon Valley developers, mine HackerNews and IRC logs for sentiment analysis about their behaviors and allegiances.
He even said he was going "make Google censor protected classes.":
Yes, they would need to organize, but what’s happening at Google is a nascent form of this kind of struggle. Before there were ever such things as unions, workers banned together and rebelled in precisely the way employees at Google are doing so now. Over time, they recognized the need to create a formal, more durable structure, which culminated in what we today think of as unions.
In terms of the practical realities of organizing developers, check out Tech Solidarity or your local DSA branch. Both groups are deeply involved with helping workers organize and restore a sane power balance to the American economy.
Organization - maybe, unionization is not. It might even shift this kind of power away from the developers with all the unethical stuff easily traded for perks and better compensation.
Organized protest doesn't necessarily mean unionization.
Look at the school walkouts in the United States lately.
Helicopter video on the news of 1,000 Googlers marching out of their offices would do a lot more to raise the nation's awareness of the issue, and put a lot more pressure on the C-level, than an internally-circulated letter.
I agree with the sentiment here, but PR driven pressure is probably not the best leverage to use in all cases. There’s real value to having internal say in the direction of the company you’re building.
That’s an important point that not many people realize about unions.
Unions are great, when they are great.
The West Virginia teacher strikes were wildcat strikes, meaning they did not have the support of their union. The union was against the strikes but the teachers had the support of their community, which is far more important.
In short, and due to the recent Janus Act, unions in the US are not going to be very helpful for a while. But, more important is building a popular consciousness ready to articulate these struggles within a capitalist system.
DSA has a few very positive tech-focused organizing efforts underway in SF and NYC. I recommend starting at http://dsausa.org
I'm curious what people think about protest commits. Would it be unethical for a group of employees to get together and push an update to put up a protest banner across some google software? Much like a picket line across a factory entrance?
> The letter is circulating on Google’s internal communication systems and is signed by about 1,000 employees, according to two people familiar with the document, who were not authorized to speak publicly.
> ...
> The internal debate over Maven, viewed by both supporters and opponents as opening the door to much bigger defense contracts, generated a petition signed by about 4,000 employees who demanded “a clear policy stating that neither Google nor its contractors will ever build warfare technology.”
Are signatures still being collected on the China letter? That count is quite a bit less than letter protesting Project Maven.
In my mind, trying to enter the Chinese market is far more concerning than Project Maven. The Chinese government has shown ample willingness to use its economic leverage to force foreign companies to adopt its stances (for instance http://time.com/5348666/airlines-websites-taiwan-china/), and subjecting Google, our main portal to the internet to that pressure is just too risky.
I'm not disputing that, and that's a pretty odd assumption to make. I'm simply saying that if 10% of Google employees had signed this, it might be news. Barely 1% doesn't seem particularly newsworthy.
It's remarkable to me that the "feelings of 1.3 billion people" are so fragile that they're unable to enjoy their coffee cake if the company that made it doesn't kowtow to Beijing.
Google's pullout of China in the first place was their biggest corporate mistake and they should at least try to remedy that.
Their absence from China didn't liberate the Chinese people and their reentry won't either, they need to ignore the hypocrites and do what's best for the company and for the long term they should tweak company culture and make it clear that rank and file employees won't have a say in big picture corporate decisions and planning, they already cost the company dearly and it must not become a habit.
Its either "Organizing the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful." or its a propaganda machine to maintain its position in the Chinese market (which will be the largest in the world soon).
I prefer google stick to its mission and serve the 6 billion of us that require free information to do our jobs.
Being the propaganda machine is the better option because it's going to happen regardless of whether it's Google. Another company will just take Google's place.
> Being the propaganda machine is the better option because it's going to happen regardless of whether it's Google. Another company will just take Google's place.
That's a shit argument. In a different context it's "someone's gotta run the gas chambers, so I might as well collect that paycheck."
"Just following revenue" is the new "just following orders."
I can't help but notice, by 6B of "us" are you deliberately omitting all Chinese? Don't you think that's inherent racism in you? Can I translate that into you are ok if 1B Chinese is erased from the earth?
Google pulled out of China not because they wanted to liberate the Chinese people, but because the PLA was hacking (as the PLA likes to say, “liberating”) Gmail accounts of HK dissidents.
> [Yahoo] claimed it had no choice other than to comply with a request from Beijing to share information about the online activities of the journalists. Yahoo handed their email records to the Chinese government.
> The journalists, Wang Xiaoning and Shi Tao, are serving 10-year jail sentences. Wang was accused of "incitement to subvert state power" after he emailed electronic journals advocating democratic reform and establishment of a multiparty system to replace the present authoritarian state. Shi was charged with passing on information that was designated a state secret
I would hope they can sign this letter without incurring "personal risk". Has the environment at Google changed so much that writing letters could risk people's chance at employment?
There's a huge difference between signing a letter arguing against capitulating to state censorship, and authoring a memo using junk science and taking studies way out of context to say that half your coworkers don't deserve to be there.
"Goebbels was in favor of free speech for views he liked. So was Stalin. If you’re really in favor of free speech, then you’re in favor of freedom of speech for precisely the views you despise. Otherwise, you’re not in favor of free speech."
The quote is a reply to your statement about what Damore said. You make a distinction between "good" speech and "bad" speech. The point of the quote is that you are not really pro-free speech unless you support the speech that you don't like. I disagree with just about everything you've said here, but I think you should be able to say it.
Sorry, but no. You're not arguing for free speech. You're arguing for speech without consequences, which basically means that Damore would have gotten free speech, but no one else would be able to choose to not associate or otherwise rebuke him because of it.
And again, he was fired because he basically said that half of his coworkers do not deserve to be there. So those coworkers then used their free speech to say they no longer wish to work with him, and they would leave the company. Google decided that the contributions of those other people were worth more than the contributions of Damore, exercised their freedom of speech, and chose no longer to associate with him. At no point whatsoever was Damore silenced or censored. He simply had to live with the consequences of his actions.
The argument for free speech is fundamentally the same regardless of whether you dislike the speech in question, or many people dislike it.
The argument is that it's better for society when those who disagree engage in dialogue instead of retaliation. So in that sense, yes, free speech is about being able to say what's on your mind without consequences.
We're not just talking about rights here, we're talking about principles. You do indeed have the right to walk away, or deny someone access to your platform, if you disagree with them.
But it's not the principled thing to do. It leads to radicalization, the collapse of consensus, and the death of the middle ground. These are the defining features of American politics today, increasingly volatile and partisan, because for so long so many people have faced consequences just for saying what's on their mind.
Free speech is fundamentally about recognizing that you disagree with someone, but at the end of the day, they're still human, they're still a fellow citizen with hopes and dreams just like you, and we can all be stronger if we find common ground and work together.
Here is Article 19 of the UN Declaration of Human Rights, which is an aspirational statement, not a legally binding treaty. Nevertheless it is considered one of the most important documents of the 20th century.
Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers.
And once again, you are putting the burden of reaching out on those who have been attacked. You are saying that those Damore said in his memo should be the ones to accept him, that those constantly attacked for committing the sin of not being a straight white male in this industry, have to not only bear the slings and arrows of that, but now have to be the ones to reach out.
No. From now on, it is the Damores of the world that have to reach out. They have to prove that they are the ones trying, instead of using junk science to claim that half their coworkers don't belong there.
You want to talk about principles? Then start by reaching out to those you put so much burden on.
A huge difference? How so? Both modern liberals of your stripe and the Chinese government want the same thing: only people who are "good guys" are permitted to freely express themselves. All that differs is who the two think "the good guys" are; the principle is exactly the same.
Wrong. You're arguing that only the Damores of the world can express themselves, and no one else is allowed to express themselves in reaction to that. You're arguing not for free speech, but speech that's free from consequences.
> You're arguing not for free speech, but speech that's free from consequences
Ah, I'm delighted to see that I'm getting somewhere. Yes, I am indeed arguing for free speech that's also free from consequences; one of the core values of classical liberalism that sprang from the Enlightenment. Freedom of speech doesn't mean much if actually exercising it invites repression and it does not matter in the slightest whether that repression comes from a government or from an outraged public.
An analogy with Jeanette Rankin comes to mind, though not precisely a speech issue; she was the sole member of the US Congress to vote against entry into WWII after the Pearl Harbor attack because of her staunch pacifist convications. After the vote she was forced to take shelter inside a phone booth until police could escort her home. According to modern liberals, she should have faced the "consequences" (your word, not mine), no matter how horrific, since they weren't coming from the government.
Note that I don't even agree with her action but, as the old quote goes "I (may) disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it."
"Yes, I am indeed arguing for speech that's free from consequences"
Which boils down to you arguing that no one else should have free speech.
"According to modern liberals, she should have faced the "consequences" (your word, not mine), no matter how horrific, since they weren't coming from the government."
When you imply that I am advocating violence like that, then you have proven that you are not discussing in good faith. You are not trying to have a discussion, you are just trying to be "right".
Claiming that I am arguing that "no one else should have free speech" and that I am "not discussing in good faith" in the same breath? Well, I don't know how to respond to that...
If you are saying that I should not be able to respond to someone else's speech, including a response of choosing not to associate with that person any longer, then you are saying that I should not have free speech.
If you are saying that I am advocating violence as a "consequence", then you are not discussing in good faith.
> including a response of choosing not to associate with that person any longer
Individuals and businesses already have restrictions on their freedom of association already, the Federal Civil Rights Act of 1964 and Fair Housing Act of 1968 that require businesses and landlords / property sellers to serve people in protected classes being prime examples.
So, yes, you could say that I am just as much in favor of restricting the freedom of association for businesses and landlords to preserve equality for protected classes as I am interested in restricting the freedom of association for common telecoms carriers and social media businesses to preserve freedom of speech.
So you're admitting you're not in favor of freedom of speech. Now we're just arguing over who you believe deserves protection, and how far that protection should go.
> You're arguing that only the Damores of the world can express themselves...
> Which boils down to you arguing that no one else should have free speech.
> So you're admitting you're not in favor of freedom of speech.
All you've done in this conversation is attempt to put words in my mouth while at the same time saying I'm the one not speaking in good faith. I see no benefit to continuing this discussion.
I've presented my reasoning, analogies, and historical precedents to the best of my humble abilities. Let the readers decide.
Because you were claiming that I was advocating for violence. The things you quoted? Those are the results of what you’re advocating for. If Google employees cannot decide not to associate with Damone after what he said, then they do not have freedom of speech. And you said that you were fine with that.
> Yes, I am indeed arguing for free speech that's also free from consequences
I don't often see someone actually owning up to this view - good for you.
I'm not sure how it's possible to enforce speech that is free from consequences. Do you have a specific definition of "consequence" that you'd like to elaborate on? Anything could be a consequence (like, just hearing the speech in the first place). What is it specifically that you're trying to protect against?
> I don't often see someone actually owning up to this view - good for you.
Not sure if you meant it this way but "owning up" sounds like it's something to be ashamed of. I'm quite proud of being a classical liberal and supporting free speech even if it does unfortunately mean that some not very nice people also get to their say their piece.
> Do you have a specific definition of "consequence" that you'd like to elaborate on? Anything could be a consequence (like, just hearing the speech in the first place).
The parent poster is the one that introduced the word "consequences" into the discussion (as I was careful to note in my response) so I refer your question to him/her. Judging by the approval with which s/he speaks of Danmore's firing, it seems rather improbable that it's benign to the recipient though.
Well, for one thing, it might suddenly become difficult to travel in China as a result of signing this letter. That would not be unprecedented.
As for Google, companies in general value employees who are flexible in the projects they're willing to work on. Without efforts to counteract bias, employees who decline projects due to ethical objections risk being seen as difficult.
However, Google employees are unlikely to be "seen as difficult" at Google for signing a petition involving a project they're not even working on. Nobody keeps track of this stuff. To get noticed, you have to show more leadership than that.
Google probably runs sentiment analysis on all its internal lists and tags everything to each persons HR file. They analyze Gmail already after all (tho’ having switched off or at least hidden its link to the ad system)
The Times article indicates 1,000+ employees signed the letter.
In some places I've worked, there would be 1,000+ job openings the next day.
I've been fired twice for doing the right thing. Once the state got involved and fined the employer, which was nice, but didn't pay the bills.
"Doing the right thing" is so very easy when it's a movie or a book or someone else. In real life, it can take months or years to rebound financially and socially, so I wish all of these people well.
No. If anything, coming out in support of Maven or google.cn would make you a target of the 1000 or so bleeding hearts that sign the petitions. From the James Damore lawsuit, there are managers who share lists of 'not to work with' people who have committed wrong-think.
James Damore was not fired for signing a letter of protest. James Damore was fired for using junk science and wildly misinterpreting other studies to fit his conclusion that half of his coworkers didn't belong at Google.
He was fired for posting a few debatable points on an internal message board, which were subsequently leaked and caused a PR embarrassment for the company.
I disagree with every single point he raised. But his termination was a political execution, similar to what recently happened to James Gunn.
We live in the Trump era, firing people is political theater.
I see I got downvoted. I stand by what I said as being on-topic and not trolling.
If Google decides to become more invested in Chinese culture, I predict we will see more ceremonial terminations. Because it becomes very difficult to resist doing that when political pressure comes into play.
Situations like what happened with Marriott go right to the heart of how corporations engage with China. It's relevant.
I am lost at what Google attempts to gain with this. Even if you abide by their rules, I don't think the Chinese Government would be very willing to lose control of a crucial communication medium to a foreign corporation. In the end, they want their companies to win.
Then, there's the PR disaster that's bound to come up once it gets official. In a single move, Google would be conveying how far it has moved from its foundational values. I fail to see how this would be a net positive for the company.
And as long as they can recruit candidates, remember. Tho’ it’s not clear where those candidates would go instead, none of the FANG companies have entirely clean hands.
Maaybe. I'm not sure how this breaks down actually. Obviously Facebook, Amazon, Netflix and Google (and probably Twitter and a few others) are competing over one pool of candidates. But that that really/fully overlap with the pool that Apple and Microsoft are competing over? But as long as people are beating down the door to get in and look mainly at the free food and massages rather than the "big picture" why would they worry?
>I am lost at what Google attempts to gain with this.
Revenue.
>Then, there's the PR disaster that's bound to come up once it gets official.
Does the public care about privacy? Does the public understand or care about China's firewall? Does the public have an attention span long enough to ruin Google's reputation?
The answer is certainly “yes”. There’s a difference between caring and having any power to do anything about it.
It’s time to move on from
Consumer activism. This nonsense of blaming people for their purchasing decisions is so rotten and useless. Judging others this way requires vain assumptions and we can do so much better.
You had me until the second paragraph. Who instigates change in society, if not for the people in it? Sadly, parent’s last question
> Does the public have an attention span long enough to ruin Google's reputation?
is a resounding ‘no’ to me right now. It is as if these days many people have the same attitude you do, wanting someone else to do the legwork to bring societal change. That’s a good way to wind up with totalitarianism, and that’s how you end up with a president for life dictating what information citizens can and cannot consume.
‘Consumer activism’ is, in so many words, not activism. It describes the effort of working towards greater change through purchasing decisions. It’s a liberal rationalization common in capitalist societies that fails to account for the systemic limitations of the consumer voice. The issues with it are many, but I’ll list a few:
- It’s dependent on a person’s spending power, which is dependent on their capital wealth, which is dependent on their endorsement of the system as a whole.
- It shames those in poverty who cannot afford to participate and generates greater class divide.
- It relies on the transparency of the business entities to definite itself. If Google doesn’t tell us how evil it is, we cannot know the importance of avoiding their services.
- It relies on the media to expose misgivings, but the media relies on the misgivers to pay their bills. You get the point.
- It places a burden on the well-meaning by insisting they deny opportunities available to their competitors.
- It pits individuals against one another, undermining the solidarity needed for lasting change.
>You had me until the second paragraph. Who instigates change in society, if not for the people in it? Sadly, parent’s last question
I think GP was downvoted because he criticized consumer activism and not just what he meant to criticize: Making change by purchasing decisions. I've generally switched to his perspective. For about a decade I felt (and acted) more like you. That experience taught me how poor a strategy it is. The success stories via boycotts are a fairly small minority. Most attempts at change via boycotts fail. It's incredibly hard even to start one.
A lot of shaming is involved, and it rarely works. People don't like to feel ashamed. As he said in his response to you, it does quickly degrade to infighting amongst consumers and a lot of energy is wasted there that could be used in alternative strategies.
It requires people to be very knowledgeable, and I saw mostly failures even amongst highly educated folks. To understand an issue, connect all the dots, etc takes a lot of effort. Most people want someone else (government agency, consumer watchdog, etc) to do all the work.
That's not to say broad media campaigns are a bad idea - I think they are necessary. But much more often than not, companies will win on the purchasing decisions battle.
Plus it's not necessarily clear who you can buy from -- for instance, if you want to buy ethically produced computers with no unfree labor anywhere in the supply chain... well, you'll eventually find this is quite difficult to do, if it's even possible.
Yes, but the there is a lot of ignorance and misinformation. I have faith that the public at large will eventually come to grips the surrounding issues.
People in the US will eventually start to care about their own privacy (maybe even enough to do something about it), but the same people probably won't care about the privacy of Chinese citizens, ever.
We pay attention to the big ticket events shown to us by the media (Tianamen Square, the occasional artist, etc.), but I seriously doubt very many people are concerned with the average person over there, since there's no easy way to package that up for a tweet.
"but the same people probably won't care about the privacy of Chinese citizens, ever."
I mean, I'd like them to be able to have it, but I have literally zero impact on any of those discussions. Since I can't really do anything about it, I don't fret about it.
No, but Google needs to worry about a much more important constituency. There are not that many people who know how to build something like this.
Most are probably wealthy, to the point they don't really need to work. All of them can figure out how to covertly contact journalists. And at least a few of them are starting to have qualms about the negative consequences of industry ignoring the social implications in pursuit of profit.
Sophisticated software can be written by anybody and is not solely in the purview of Google's flawless hiring system. Operating systems, physics engines, 3d graphics applications, have been created by many not-a-stanford-degree-toting individual.
The 'anything is possible' rebuttal only dampens conversation. We can roll a bowling ball back and forth over a keyboard to the same effect. Truly sophisticated software is written by developers very few and far between.
You might feel that way, but sophisticated software has been written by average developers in the past and it will happen in the future. The odds are not great but the industry is well into the 100’s of millions of man hour territory and unusual things happen accidentally if nothing else more often than you might think.
PS: However, when what you say is literally wrong I don’t think it deserves a detailed response.
I wholeheartedly disagree, as do many others evidently. But thank you for pointing out how I must feel and then passing off your opinion as fact. Perhaps we have different definitions of sophisticated software, that's all.
"PS:" Since we're critiquing responses, your initial response should have never existed. It provided nothing of value to the conversation. Odd that you would provide assessment of other's comments... but thank you.
Prove it, or even try to provide support even highly indirect support for you opinion.
Might != Must. I would happy let honest confusion slide, but you seem to be having trouble using the English language ;0
PS: Now, if you want to elevate the conversion avoid saying dumb things that get dumb responses. Sure, you can continue to whine, but don't expect to get any respect that way.
I want you to go over your comment and say again who has trouble with the English language, lmao. Go take your ridiculous sources elsewhere, grow some skin, and stop being so defensive. It'll do you some good in this world. The only person saying dumb things is the one sourcing a scenario of monkeys banging on a computer. =)
Another senseless rebuttal. At least there's no mention of monkeys this time. My argument stands: you offer no value here. Go elsewhere, and take your family of like-minded monkeys with you. And in turn, save all of us our time instead lmao.
I think you're overestimating this because of the bubble we are in. I remember similar things said about govt hiring after Snowden's revelations, and nothing has changed. No one even talks about it anymore, even on this site.
> Most are probably wealthy, to the point they don't really need to work.
I have been working at one of the FAANGs in SV for almost 15 years and no, this is absolutely not right. Only less than 5% of my colleagues "don't need to work". A lot of smart people I know would happily work for Google even after it goes ahead with China plans.
> And at least a few of them are starting to have qualms...
This is true. But that number is just a tiny, albeit loud, minority.
Does the tech community care about privacy? Google tracks users on an industrial scale. Yet most people in the tech community shrug their shoulders and say 'so what?'. Or they rush to Google's defence. (Does a giant multi-billion dollar company need your defence?)
Google has a peculiar slant on privacy - they seems to think it's all about security and nothing else. You can't have privacy without security, but security by itself does not equal privacy. It's the equivalent of saying we'll track you to death (and save it to our servers), but you can rest assured that your personal information will never leak. The tech community happily accepts that as perfectly fine.
"Biggest untapped market in the world" is a phrase that you'll hear a lot if you listen to the financial news networks. That's the long and short of it.
Not to be snarky but aren't they censoring at home as well? Whatever you think of Alex Jones or whatever you think you think about him and his ilk, censoring speech is for the feeble minded and tyrannous. Let's leave thought policing to the politicians and the government.
Let's be clear here, it's not that they don't want content on their platform: it's that content blatantly violates their rules.
Encouraging the harassment of families of school shooting victims is pretty heinous, and not something I'd want affiliated with my brand. I also wouldn't want my brand to become a platform for someone who perpetuates conspiracy theories that cause true believes to pick up weapons and become terrorists, simply because that's how he makes a buck.
After all, both Google and Twitter have spent close to a decade silencing religious extremists on their platforms. Where were the free speech advocates when fundamentalist Muslims were silenced on Twitter and couldn't use the platform to spread their message?
Yeah, I equated the two concepts: they created rules to specify what they do and don't want on their platform. Sorry if it came across as them deciding arbitrarily on the fly.
People are really confusing a free speech issue with a first amendment issue.
It's not a first amendment issue because the first amendment only forbids the government from censoring speech, and private companies are not the government.
However, it's still a free speech issue, and it's still a censorship issue. Just not a first amendment issue.
Private companies can still censor and can stifle/forbid free speech.
> People are really confusing a free speech issue with a first amendment issue.
No, people disagree on the meaning, scope, nature, and purpose of “free speech”, despite agreeing that “free speech” is a good thing.
It's true that the First Amendment (especially when combined with incorporation under the 14th) directly embodies a reasonably close approximation of one of the viewpoints of what free speech is all about, while simultaneously looking like a narrow special case of one of the other viewpoints.
But the nature of the disagreement here is not confusion between a principle and a legal embodiment of that principle, but a fundamental clash of beliefs about the nature of the named principle.
Censorship can obviously be done by states, but the definition is not restricted to states only.
>Censorship is the suppression of speech, public communication, or other information, on the basis that such material is considered objectionable, harmful, sensitive, or "inconvenient" as determined by a government or private institution
Instead of completely censorsing/hiding things from you, suspected spam is placed in a folder that you can view and decide for yourself whether or not it's worth your attention.
> Let's leave thought policing to the politicians and the government.
That's actually exactly what the First Amendment of the United States Constitution explicitly prevents.
What it doens't prevent, though, is what you're actually upset about. Private corporations and individuals can censor all day long in the United States. It's a great misunderstanding that they're somehow not entitled to that.
Except his speech has put innocent people at risk of being harassed, or in physical danger. When they sued he immediately claimed he was the victim. I have no sympathy for Alex Jones. Don't claim free speech to harass people, then get upset when you're sued for harassment.
YouTube is a private platform, and they can censor whatever they like. It only interrupts Freedom of Speech if the government influences this censorship.
Meanwhile, in China, the government dictates all censorship. Google is required to follow this exactly.
I doubt very much it'll be Baidu, and maybe what supplants Google doesn't exist yet. Maybe it doesn't happen at all.
I just think that with China drawing towards being almost 20% of the population of the entire planet, the government there wields a lot more power globally than they are credited with.
A 20% smaller market is a serious disadvantage in the future, and I imagine Google have known this for some time.
I think we were all hoping their withdrawal would contribute to an eventual change of the censorship policy, but that hasn't happened, and by all accounts looks less likely now.
A 20% smaller market is only 20% smaller if some entity from China can command more in total. There is no evidence that this Chinese tech companies can operate successfully at Google’s scale without running into their own international barriers.
They're a publicly-traded corporation. If they don't grow by a certain amount every quarter, their stock will drop. Also, if there's a market they could get into and they choose not to, they could be sued by their shareholders.
I know "everything is securities fraud" is one of Matt Levine's memes, but it's my understanding this is not actually grounds for a lawsuit? The company has to have misled investors in some way.
> I don't see how Google can afford not to do this.
They're not doing it right now and seem to be affording it just fine: at their most recent earnings call, revenue was up 23% YoY to hit $110 billion annually, EPS was up 32%, and share price was up about 25%. There's no excuse for this other than the capitalist dictum that more income must be pursued at any cost.
Baidu is not a global competitor to Google, at all. Their English-language results are a joke; not even close to being as good as Bing's, never mind Google's.
I understand this. Maybe it'll be Bing. Maybe Amazon Search in 2025.
My point is that by forgoing any amount of market Google is effectively allowing a competitor to ultimately have whatever their own growth potential is, plus 20%.
Its not about whether they need the money, which clearly they don't, it's whether by leaving it on the table (for reasons I agree with) they risk allowing themselves to be supplanted by someone else who isn't even pretending to "not be evil".
The other equally cynical argument I would make is, they're a public company, they have to make the numbers keep going up. I don't like being the d-word saying this.
"Morally, of course its wrong, but what's the alternative over the long term?"
To not do it. Google has plenty of fucking money; they don't need all the money.
"They would cede the market to a more accommodating competitor (e.g. Baidu), who would then have a strategic advantage."
In China. There are plenty of other people in the world, and most of those people do not want a search engine where the results are chosen by a totalitarian government.
This idea that Google "has to" do this, and that there can be only one winner of anything, ever, is terrible, and I believe is directly responsible for most of the ills of our day.
While I agree with you in principle, turn the theory on its head.
If Google (and Bing, just as an example of a less popular rival) were principled enough to say "you know what? No. We're not censoring." (as has been Google's policy until now) would Western governments meet them halfway and take a stand against rivals that were doing it elsewhere?
I believe that's what it would take to level the playing field (and I admit I could be naive here), but the suggestion itself is preposterous. No western government is ever going to place what would amount to an embargo on a search engine over them censoring results in another country.
I hear what people are saying about user's will vote with their feet (or hands as it were), and that Google is safe with their already dominant position, but I don't think history supports that view.
I also don't think the average user cares that much if someone else is getting censored thousands of miles away. Maybe I'm cynical, but people at large just don't care about this stuff, and I say this as someone who cares deeply about it.
(How many people outside of tech remember Edward Snowden? I'm sure they'll recall the name but I'd be surprised if you'd hear more than "was that the Russian spy guy?")
I really hope Google won't submit to censoring in China, I just think it's likely they will.
This is the part I don't get. It is my understanding that if you offer an internet service in China, you have to give your source code to the central government. I'm not super well versed on this but would love to learn a bit from someone on HN that understands these requirements in more detail and how google might try and work around them if needed.
Many of their competitors operate in China to some degree: Yahoo, Bing, even DuckDuckGo until 2014. There's no shifting from values here, Google operated in China until 2010 when it was kicked out, and this is just a move to make it back in.
I don't want to be relying on the broken windows fallacy here however. We don't know the extent to which the Chinese government wants Google to comply. Since there are already a bunch of comments speculating the negatives, we can do the same with the positives.
Let's look at the potential benefits of existing in China. Results will be censored, there's no getting around that, but unfavorable, yet uncensored, results can be prioritized. Support for Chinese related tools might improve due to the increase in data. Translation could see a quality improvement for one of the most spoken languages in the world. Google may see an increase in revenue, potentially creating more jobs. Ads in China may provide an easier entry way for Americans to advertise there. I'm sure the list goes on.
There seems to exist a belief that China kicked Google out of the country at some point.
I can’t find a record of even just the Chinese side claiming they have “evicted” Google. Perhaps the “Google doesn’t want to censor; kick Google out” version of events makes more sense with each year just because it’s simpler. It also distorts reality, though, so I think reminding everyone (including myself) the more mainstream timeline is worth a moment.
Originally Google China was offering the censored version of search to users within China, which was a controversy. At some point a massive hack targeted Gmail accounts belonging to dissidents and activists of all kinds (from cryptography to Falun Gong religion). Google supposedly could’ve chosen to keep the breach to itself, but did made it public the next year and cited as a reason to reconsider its Chinese operations[0][1].
It’s true that Google’s competitors in search have continued to operate within Chinese market. They have been facing the same issues[2], and by the looks of the history of it many of similar events may well not be publicly known.
As of now the only Google service available within mainland China that I know of is Google Translate. I believe it’s made available via servers in China, as the latency seems on par with other local apps.
I honestly couldn't care less about search results in China.
Why aren't they protesting about their technology potentially being abused during election cycles in US? That is something that hits closer to home for me.
There is some element of YouTube (and maybe Google Search results) returning things and suggesting things that are intended to lead people towards whomever is paying for those things to float to the top.
I think this is the third time in as many months I'm reading about Google employees protesting their employer's behavior.
One the one hand, it's clearly a good sign that employees are comfortable doing this, as it could guide an enormous company to do better things for the world, and the lack of a contractual Sword of Damocles over their continued employment encourages the free flow of information and conversation.
On the other...were the first two times that your employer was found to be engaged in behavior you found to be morally bankrupt not enough? At some point, it's the rule, not the exception.
Such desperate moves on Google’s part do not bode well for the numbers in their next quarterly report. They knew there would be strong blowback, yet they chose to do it anyway. That could mean other ads markets are decelerating, which would be a very bad news indeed for an advertising company like Google which derives 90% of its income from ads. Hence the desperation. Disclaimer: this is all just a conjecture, I do not have any positions in GOOG.
I don't get why this is such a big thing. I'm not taking any sides here, but what's surprising to me is that I never saw any mention of Microsoft in the comments over the last couple days, when stories about google going into China again hit HN. Nobody seems to care what kind of deals they have with the chinese govt to offer bing, hotmail or plain old windows in China. Have we all just accepted that Microsoft is pure evil and would do anything to make a buck or two? This is in stark contrast with how whenever a google related story hit HN before, everyone was giving them shit in the comments about invading everyone's privacy, collecting data like crazy, closing down every service they ever bought up, improperly implement protocols or create new standards hurting the competition. It sounds like the full "old Microsoft" experience, but now everyone is super surprised and disappointed how they could possibly do this move. I don't get it.
Google, by their own admission, was supporting totalitarianism in censoring search results before they decided to stop doing so several years ago. I don't see what Microsoft has to do with holding Google to their own self-established standard of ethics.
So you're buying into the story that they only pulled out of China because they didn't want to support censorship anymore. That was merely a PR stunt since they knew that's what would resonate well with Americans or the west in general.* But even then, you're saying that you're totally fine with Microsoft doing this just because they never made a statement saying they don't like censorship? Imo one should judge companies by ones own convictions, at least when it's about fundamental believes of what is right or wrong. I guess I still don't get it.
* (primarily because cn gov requested extensive access to their infrastructure, claims of attempted or partially successful break-in attempts, etc. When they ceased all censorship in China the decision was already made to leave, it was just for show.)
I never commented on the behavior of Microsoft because they have nothing to do with the topic at hand: Google being held to a standard that THEY established when they said they were getting out of China (at least partially) because of ongoing censorship.
Ok I get that part. Still, Microsoft is in the same business doing the same things, so to me it would have been natural if it would have been brought up in this context. Just like when there's a post about a new Chrome feature, people start comparing it to Firefox, or when an article about a political decision of country X is posted, people start comparing it to the situation in countries Y and Z.
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[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 305 ms ] threadGoogle Employees Resign in Protest Against Pentagon Contract
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17064776
You realize that US Military Tech goes into killing innocent people literally all the time, right?
Such tech developed, isnt intended to kill innocents, just like the inevitable future deaths of self driving cars are not.
Repressive dictatorship that regularly jails political dissidents = bad
You also state that "not everything has to be binary" and then say something can be "worst", which is the same absolute you seem to be arguing against
What about Libya? What is the state of Libya? Let's not even get started on Afghanistan. Do you even know of Task force 47 in war of 1971 between India-Pakistan?
I'm not well versed in geo politics of Latin America but there have been cases over there as well where US would meddle in internal affairs of a country and overthrow a ruler.
> So "invading" is not the correct word...
I think you are contradicting yourself?
We invaded on false pretense 'Weapons of Mass Destruction' if I recall - it was an invasion and ideally it should have been an effort driven by the UN instead of the Republican party of the USA.
https://www.amazon.com/Thunder-Run-Baghdad-Not-Specified/dp/...
Its shot from the POV of bhagdadis
Imagine how much worse things would be if technical progress stopped 70 years ago and the military only had battleship cannon fire and napalm firebombing at its disposal.
Also, nothing is preventing one from founding a startup which elects its leaders democratically.
Not true, you can have a labor union for one company.
>one can deal/negotiate directly with companies individually.
Also not true, I have zero ability to deal/negotiate with my company and I'd say this is a period where workers actually have less rights and less ability to negotiate other than simply quitting which isn't really sustainable for many people since 80% of the country is living paycheck to paycheck [1]. As we approach full employment workers should be gaining more ability to negotiate, but it's not happening.
>Also, nothing is preventing one from founding a startup which elects its leaders democratically.
Lack of funding, lack of credit. This is always the 'easy answer' for capitalists 'just start your own company', but it's really not that easy.
[1] https://www.cnbc.com/2017/08/24/most-americans-live-paycheck...
Yes, you can, but for all practical purposes I believe this would never happen, as it’s unsustainable. I mean, can you imagine every little startup or small company having their own union? I think the whole point of a union is to represent workers across the industry, unless you’re tied to a huge corporation, in which case it would make sense to have its own.
> Lack of funding, ...
So if starting a company ‘is not that easy’, why do people complain about companies being ran like dictatorships?
It seems that, despite the hardship, these “dictators” have managed to successfully bring something into existence and ought to exert more control over a company’s fate, don’t you think?
And for the sake of clarity, I’m not denying the huge contribution of early employees, just to be clear. I think they’re instrumental to any successful venture.
Google, because of historical quirks with its culture, has provided employees a platform to do this, if only in a limited form. And what we see there is workers using it to organize and impose change from the bottom-up.
They’ll probably soon realize the limits of acting without a parallel power structure, such as a union, when executive power crashes down on them to curb this growing rebellion. But like I said, I’m hopeful that all the very smart people at Google will come to understand their true class position as labor relative to management and build something more durable that can help put the company back on a better, more ethical track.
I support anything that damages Google as an entity, or throws egg on the faces of those who choose to work for them, so this apparent revolution-of-conscience from within is pretty delightful to behold.
The difference is, things you listed have clear good/useful applications beyond the obvious problems, and employees may be less inclined to protest if they believe the company is working in good faith. In contrast, both the China situation and project Maven seem much more directly problematic.
These things have clear benefit to the user (face unlock and personal photo search, personal email search, search ranking, instant search). Adding yet another censored search engine in China does not.
If you'd please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and use HN as intended in the future, we'd appreciate it.
The fact is that we can express and engage in intellectual curiosity is a result of politics.
https://archive.fo/bRI7h#selection-567.0-573.417
> Silicon Valley work forces are made mostly of first-generations from other cultures that are mostly not progressive in the Western sense. China, Korea, and Vietnam spent the last half of the 20th century either running from or killing communists. Some have had family involved. These potential Silicon Valley defectors, especially from Google, are fucking gold mines. Devs always keep a copy of code/db dumps. As the defectors pile up, they will bring more and more evidence of cyber phrenology. Silicon Valley will have its Snowden moment.
> As these efforts go into full swing and the defectors pile up, Silicon Valley will have to institute Scientology-style restrictions of expression and behavior. These limitations will only create more defectors as internal reprimands become more reactionary. If you need help finding the psychology of Silicon Valley developers, mine HackerNews and IRC logs for sentiment analysis about their behaviors and allegiances.
He even said he was going "make Google censor protected classes.":
https://twitter.com/emblem21CEO/status/919673752480235520
There's no such plan. The Communist Party will kick them out faster than you can say "great firewall" if they took any action to undermine their censorship regime.
https://archive.fo/bRI7h#selection-567.0-573.417
> Silicon Valley work forces are made mostly of first-generations from other cultures that are mostly not progressive in the Western sense. China, Korea, and Vietnam spent the last half of the 20th century either running from or killing communists. Some have had family involved. These potential Silicon Valley defectors, especially from Google, are fucking gold mines. Devs always keep a copy of code/db dumps. As the defectors pile up, they will bring more and more evidence of cyber phrenology. Silicon Valley will have its Snowden moment.
> As these efforts go into full swing and the defectors pile up, Silicon Valley will have to institute Scientology-style restrictions of expression and behavior. These limitations will only create more defectors as internal reprimands become more reactionary. If you need help finding the psychology of Silicon Valley developers, mine HackerNews and IRC logs for sentiment analysis about their behaviors and allegiances.
He even said he was going "make Google censor protected classes.":
https://twitter.com/emblem21CEO/status/919673752480235520
In terms of the practical realities of organizing developers, check out Tech Solidarity or your local DSA branch. Both groups are deeply involved with helping workers organize and restore a sane power balance to the American economy.
https://techsolidarity.org/
https://www.dsausa.org/
I’d like to echo the sibling comment to visit your local DSA branch if you want more information.
Look at the school walkouts in the United States lately.
Helicopter video on the news of 1,000 Googlers marching out of their offices would do a lot more to raise the nation's awareness of the issue, and put a lot more pressure on the C-level, than an internally-circulated letter.
Unions are great, when they are great.
The West Virginia teacher strikes were wildcat strikes, meaning they did not have the support of their union. The union was against the strikes but the teachers had the support of their community, which is far more important.
In short, and due to the recent Janus Act, unions in the US are not going to be very helpful for a while. But, more important is building a popular consciousness ready to articulate these struggles within a capitalist system.
DSA has a few very positive tech-focused organizing efforts underway in SF and NYC. I recommend starting at http://dsausa.org
> ...
> The internal debate over Maven, viewed by both supporters and opponents as opening the door to much bigger defense contracts, generated a petition signed by about 4,000 employees who demanded “a clear policy stating that neither Google nor its contractors will ever build warfare technology.”
Are signatures still being collected on the China letter? That count is quite a bit less than letter protesting Project Maven.
In my mind, trying to enter the Chinese market is far more concerning than Project Maven. The Chinese government has shown ample willingness to use its economic leverage to force foreign companies to adopt its stances (for instance http://time.com/5348666/airlines-websites-taiwan-china/), and subjecting Google, our main portal to the internet to that pressure is just too risky.
If you get 85,000 people together you can get 850 of them to agree to just about anything.
It's remarkable to me that the "feelings of 1.3 billion people" are so fragile that they're unable to enjoy their coffee cake if the company that made it doesn't kowtow to Beijing.
Their absence from China didn't liberate the Chinese people and their reentry won't either, they need to ignore the hypocrites and do what's best for the company and for the long term they should tweak company culture and make it clear that rank and file employees won't have a say in big picture corporate decisions and planning, they already cost the company dearly and it must not become a habit.
No personal swipes, please.
Also, people comment like that on internet message boards all the time; it's basically the default style.
I prefer google stick to its mission and serve the 6 billion of us that require free information to do our jobs.
That's a shit argument. In a different context it's "someone's gotta run the gas chambers, so I might as well collect that paycheck."
"Just following revenue" is the new "just following orders."
Google's reentry into China will definitely give the Chinese government leverage over them. It's opening the door for stuff like this to happen:
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2007/nov/14/news.yaho...
> [Yahoo] claimed it had no choice other than to comply with a request from Beijing to share information about the online activities of the journalists. Yahoo handed their email records to the Chinese government.
> The journalists, Wang Xiaoning and Shi Tao, are serving 10-year jail sentences. Wang was accused of "incitement to subvert state power" after he emailed electronic journals advocating democratic reform and establishment of a multiparty system to replace the present authoritarian state. Shi was charged with passing on information that was designated a state secret
You are taking a personal risk but you are absolutely doing the right thing.
Though this particular issue seems harmless enough.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google%27s_Ideological_Echo_...
- Noam Chomsky
And again, he was fired because he basically said that half of his coworkers do not deserve to be there. So those coworkers then used their free speech to say they no longer wish to work with him, and they would leave the company. Google decided that the contributions of those other people were worth more than the contributions of Damore, exercised their freedom of speech, and chose no longer to associate with him. At no point whatsoever was Damore silenced or censored. He simply had to live with the consequences of his actions.
The argument is that it's better for society when those who disagree engage in dialogue instead of retaliation. So in that sense, yes, free speech is about being able to say what's on your mind without consequences.
We're not just talking about rights here, we're talking about principles. You do indeed have the right to walk away, or deny someone access to your platform, if you disagree with them.
But it's not the principled thing to do. It leads to radicalization, the collapse of consensus, and the death of the middle ground. These are the defining features of American politics today, increasingly volatile and partisan, because for so long so many people have faced consequences just for saying what's on their mind.
Free speech is fundamentally about recognizing that you disagree with someone, but at the end of the day, they're still human, they're still a fellow citizen with hopes and dreams just like you, and we can all be stronger if we find common ground and work together.
Here is Article 19 of the UN Declaration of Human Rights, which is an aspirational statement, not a legally binding treaty. Nevertheless it is considered one of the most important documents of the 20th century.
Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers.
No. From now on, it is the Damores of the world that have to reach out. They have to prove that they are the ones trying, instead of using junk science to claim that half their coworkers don't belong there.
You want to talk about principles? Then start by reaching out to those you put so much burden on.
Ah, I'm delighted to see that I'm getting somewhere. Yes, I am indeed arguing for free speech that's also free from consequences; one of the core values of classical liberalism that sprang from the Enlightenment. Freedom of speech doesn't mean much if actually exercising it invites repression and it does not matter in the slightest whether that repression comes from a government or from an outraged public.
An analogy with Jeanette Rankin comes to mind, though not precisely a speech issue; she was the sole member of the US Congress to vote against entry into WWII after the Pearl Harbor attack because of her staunch pacifist convications. After the vote she was forced to take shelter inside a phone booth until police could escort her home. According to modern liberals, she should have faced the "consequences" (your word, not mine), no matter how horrific, since they weren't coming from the government.
Note that I don't even agree with her action but, as the old quote goes "I (may) disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it."
Which boils down to you arguing that no one else should have free speech.
"According to modern liberals, she should have faced the "consequences" (your word, not mine), no matter how horrific, since they weren't coming from the government."
When you imply that I am advocating violence like that, then you have proven that you are not discussing in good faith. You are not trying to have a discussion, you are just trying to be "right".
If you are saying that I am advocating violence as a "consequence", then you are not discussing in good faith.
Individuals and businesses already have restrictions on their freedom of association already, the Federal Civil Rights Act of 1964 and Fair Housing Act of 1968 that require businesses and landlords / property sellers to serve people in protected classes being prime examples.
So, yes, you could say that I am just as much in favor of restricting the freedom of association for businesses and landlords to preserve equality for protected classes as I am interested in restricting the freedom of association for common telecoms carriers and social media businesses to preserve freedom of speech.
> Which boils down to you arguing that no one else should have free speech.
> So you're admitting you're not in favor of freedom of speech.
All you've done in this conversation is attempt to put words in my mouth while at the same time saying I'm the one not speaking in good faith. I see no benefit to continuing this discussion.
I've presented my reasoning, analogies, and historical precedents to the best of my humble abilities. Let the readers decide.
I don't often see someone actually owning up to this view - good for you.
I'm not sure how it's possible to enforce speech that is free from consequences. Do you have a specific definition of "consequence" that you'd like to elaborate on? Anything could be a consequence (like, just hearing the speech in the first place). What is it specifically that you're trying to protect against?
Not sure if you meant it this way but "owning up" sounds like it's something to be ashamed of. I'm quite proud of being a classical liberal and supporting free speech even if it does unfortunately mean that some not very nice people also get to their say their piece.
> Do you have a specific definition of "consequence" that you'd like to elaborate on? Anything could be a consequence (like, just hearing the speech in the first place).
The parent poster is the one that introduced the word "consequences" into the discussion (as I was careful to note in my response) so I refer your question to him/her. Judging by the approval with which s/he speaks of Danmore's firing, it seems rather improbable that it's benign to the recipient though.
As for Google, companies in general value employees who are flexible in the projects they're willing to work on. Without efforts to counteract bias, employees who decline projects due to ethical objections risk being seen as difficult.
However, Google employees are unlikely to be "seen as difficult" at Google for signing a petition involving a project they're not even working on. Nobody keeps track of this stuff. To get noticed, you have to show more leadership than that.
Google probably runs sentiment analysis on all its internal lists and tags everything to each persons HR file. They analyze Gmail already after all (tho’ having switched off or at least hidden its link to the ad system)
These are the managers who bragged about maintaining blacklists, remember. They certainly do police thoughtcrime.
In some places I've worked, there would be 1,000+ job openings the next day.
I've been fired twice for doing the right thing. Once the state got involved and fined the employer, which was nice, but didn't pay the bills.
"Doing the right thing" is so very easy when it's a movie or a book or someone else. In real life, it can take months or years to rebound financially and socially, so I wish all of these people well.
On the other hand, the person who leaked this to the NY Times will get fired if they can find them.
I disagree with every single point he raised. But his termination was a political execution, similar to what recently happened to James Gunn.
We live in the Trump era, firing people is political theater.
If Google decides to become more invested in Chinese culture, I predict we will see more ceremonial terminations. Because it becomes very difficult to resist doing that when political pressure comes into play.
Situations like what happened with Marriott go right to the heart of how corporations engage with China. It's relevant.
https://gizmodo.com/after-china-got-mad-marriott-fired-a-soc...
Then, there's the PR disaster that's bound to come up once it gets official. In a single move, Google would be conveying how far it has moved from its foundational values. I fail to see how this would be a net positive for the company.
Consumer activism and job shaming is a moot effort. Useless.
What have they ever accomplished?
The only way to make a difference here is by standing together.
Maaybe. I'm not sure how this breaks down actually. Obviously Facebook, Amazon, Netflix and Google (and probably Twitter and a few others) are competing over one pool of candidates. But that that really/fully overlap with the pool that Apple and Microsoft are competing over? But as long as people are beating down the door to get in and look mainly at the free food and massages rather than the "big picture" why would they worry?
Revenue.
>Then, there's the PR disaster that's bound to come up once it gets official.
Does the public care about privacy? Does the public understand or care about China's firewall? Does the public have an attention span long enough to ruin Google's reputation?
Does the public care about anyone in China's privacy?
The answer is certainly “yes”. There’s a difference between caring and having any power to do anything about it.
It’s time to move on from Consumer activism. This nonsense of blaming people for their purchasing decisions is so rotten and useless. Judging others this way requires vain assumptions and we can do so much better.
> Does the public have an attention span long enough to ruin Google's reputation?
is a resounding ‘no’ to me right now. It is as if these days many people have the same attitude you do, wanting someone else to do the legwork to bring societal change. That’s a good way to wind up with totalitarianism, and that’s how you end up with a president for life dictating what information citizens can and cannot consume.
‘Consumer activism’ is, in so many words, not activism. It describes the effort of working towards greater change through purchasing decisions. It’s a liberal rationalization common in capitalist societies that fails to account for the systemic limitations of the consumer voice. The issues with it are many, but I’ll list a few:
- It’s dependent on a person’s spending power, which is dependent on their capital wealth, which is dependent on their endorsement of the system as a whole.
- It shames those in poverty who cannot afford to participate and generates greater class divide.
- It relies on the transparency of the business entities to definite itself. If Google doesn’t tell us how evil it is, we cannot know the importance of avoiding their services.
- It relies on the media to expose misgivings, but the media relies on the misgivers to pay their bills. You get the point.
- It places a burden on the well-meaning by insisting they deny opportunities available to their competitors.
- It pits individuals against one another, undermining the solidarity needed for lasting change.
I think GP was downvoted because he criticized consumer activism and not just what he meant to criticize: Making change by purchasing decisions. I've generally switched to his perspective. For about a decade I felt (and acted) more like you. That experience taught me how poor a strategy it is. The success stories via boycotts are a fairly small minority. Most attempts at change via boycotts fail. It's incredibly hard even to start one.
A lot of shaming is involved, and it rarely works. People don't like to feel ashamed. As he said in his response to you, it does quickly degrade to infighting amongst consumers and a lot of energy is wasted there that could be used in alternative strategies.
It requires people to be very knowledgeable, and I saw mostly failures even amongst highly educated folks. To understand an issue, connect all the dots, etc takes a lot of effort. Most people want someone else (government agency, consumer watchdog, etc) to do all the work.
That's not to say broad media campaigns are a bad idea - I think they are necessary. But much more often than not, companies will win on the purchasing decisions battle.
Yes, but the there is a lot of ignorance and misinformation. I have faith that the public at large will eventually come to grips the surrounding issues.
We pay attention to the big ticket events shown to us by the media (Tianamen Square, the occasional artist, etc.), but I seriously doubt very many people are concerned with the average person over there, since there's no easy way to package that up for a tweet.
I mean, I'd like them to be able to have it, but I have literally zero impact on any of those discussions. Since I can't really do anything about it, I don't fret about it.
Most are probably wealthy, to the point they don't really need to work. All of them can figure out how to covertly contact journalists. And at least a few of them are starting to have qualms about the negative consequences of industry ignoring the social implications in pursuit of profit.
Well that's just not true.
> is not solely in the purview of Google's flawless hiring system
Well that's not what was asserted at all.
> [...] have been created by many not-a-stanford-degree-toting individual
And neither was that.
PS: However, when what you say is literally wrong I don’t think it deserves a detailed response.
"PS:" Since we're critiquing responses, your initial response should have never existed. It provided nothing of value to the conversation. Odd that you would provide assessment of other's comments... but thank you.
Might != Must. I would happy let honest confusion slide, but you seem to be having trouble using the English language ;0
PS: Now, if you want to elevate the conversion avoid saying dumb things that get dumb responses. Sure, you can continue to whine, but don't expect to get any respect that way.
Edit: oh, and here you go, bozo https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muphry%27s_law
Truly, a glorious use of everyone's time.
> Well that's just not true.
Is not an argument. When you say nothing of value their is nothing to respond to.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
My bad, I was assuming this was reasonably civil just snarky. But, I guess that’s not ok.
Please look up the difference between there/their/they're.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
I have been working at one of the FAANGs in SV for almost 15 years and no, this is absolutely not right. Only less than 5% of my colleagues "don't need to work". A lot of smart people I know would happily work for Google even after it goes ahead with China plans.
> And at least a few of them are starting to have qualms...
This is true. But that number is just a tiny, albeit loud, minority.
Does the tech community care about privacy? Google tracks users on an industrial scale. Yet most people in the tech community shrug their shoulders and say 'so what?'. Or they rush to Google's defence. (Does a giant multi-billion dollar company need your defence?)
Google has a peculiar slant on privacy - they seems to think it's all about security and nothing else. You can't have privacy without security, but security by itself does not equal privacy. It's the equivalent of saying we'll track you to death (and save it to our servers), but you can rest assured that your personal information will never leak. The tech community happily accepts that as perfectly fine.
MBAs vs humans. I hope the humans win.
I'm finding this hard to believe. China has over a billion people. Google would be insane to ignore it.
You can turn safe search off in the US.
1) Google has decided that it does not want this content on their platform.
2) The totalitarian government has decided that nobody can access this content on any platform.
Encouraging the harassment of families of school shooting victims is pretty heinous, and not something I'd want affiliated with my brand. I also wouldn't want my brand to become a platform for someone who perpetuates conspiracy theories that cause true believes to pick up weapons and become terrorists, simply because that's how he makes a buck.
After all, both Google and Twitter have spent close to a decade silencing religious extremists on their platforms. Where were the free speech advocates when fundamentalist Muslims were silenced on Twitter and couldn't use the platform to spread their message?
It's not a first amendment issue because the first amendment only forbids the government from censoring speech, and private companies are not the government.
However, it's still a free speech issue, and it's still a censorship issue. Just not a first amendment issue.
Private companies can still censor and can stifle/forbid free speech.
No, people disagree on the meaning, scope, nature, and purpose of “free speech”, despite agreeing that “free speech” is a good thing.
It's true that the First Amendment (especially when combined with incorporation under the 14th) directly embodies a reasonably close approximation of one of the viewpoints of what free speech is all about, while simultaneously looking like a narrow special case of one of the other viewpoints.
But the nature of the disagreement here is not confusion between a principle and a legal embodiment of that principle, but a fundamental clash of beliefs about the nature of the named principle.
False, we do not live in ancient Rome, so censorship can be done by people who are not government officials.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Censorship
>Censorship is the suppression of speech, public communication, or other information, on the basis that such material is considered objectionable, harmful, sensitive, or "inconvenient" as determined by a government or private institution
Instead of completely censorsing/hiding things from you, suspected spam is placed in a folder that you can view and decide for yourself whether or not it's worth your attention.
That's actually exactly what the First Amendment of the United States Constitution explicitly prevents.
What it doens't prevent, though, is what you're actually upset about. Private corporations and individuals can censor all day long in the United States. It's a great misunderstanding that they're somehow not entitled to that.
Meanwhile, in China, the government dictates all censorship. Google is required to follow this exactly.
Very big difference.
Morally, of course its wrong, but what's the alternative over the long term?
They would cede the market to a more accomodating competitor (e.g. Baidu), who would then have a strategic advantage.
Google's potential market share is (world - China - whichever other country wants to censor them)
Google is big. It's not invincible.
Perhaps that is so, but you need to explain how, given Google’s massive lead everywhere else.
I just think that with China drawing towards being almost 20% of the population of the entire planet, the government there wields a lot more power globally than they are credited with.
A 20% smaller market is a serious disadvantage in the future, and I imagine Google have known this for some time.
I think we were all hoping their withdrawal would contribute to an eventual change of the censorship policy, but that hasn't happened, and by all accounts looks less likely now.
Fight censorship, really fight it, and enter all those markets with uncensorable peer-to-peer tech all the way, even replacing money.
Where does this idea come from that no matter how big and secure you are, it's not enough? Do people just like drama?
(Not a lawyer, not legal advice, etc.)
They're not doing it right now and seem to be affording it just fine: at their most recent earnings call, revenue was up 23% YoY to hit $110 billion annually, EPS was up 32%, and share price was up about 25%. There's no excuse for this other than the capitalist dictum that more income must be pursued at any cost.
Baidu is not a global competitor to Google, at all. Their English-language results are a joke; not even close to being as good as Bing's, never mind Google's.
My point is that by forgoing any amount of market Google is effectively allowing a competitor to ultimately have whatever their own growth potential is, plus 20%.
Its not about whether they need the money, which clearly they don't, it's whether by leaving it on the table (for reasons I agree with) they risk allowing themselves to be supplanted by someone else who isn't even pretending to "not be evil".
The other equally cynical argument I would make is, they're a public company, they have to make the numbers keep going up. I don't like being the d-word saying this.
To not do it. Google has plenty of fucking money; they don't need all the money.
"They would cede the market to a more accommodating competitor (e.g. Baidu), who would then have a strategic advantage."
In China. There are plenty of other people in the world, and most of those people do not want a search engine where the results are chosen by a totalitarian government.
This idea that Google "has to" do this, and that there can be only one winner of anything, ever, is terrible, and I believe is directly responsible for most of the ills of our day.
If Google (and Bing, just as an example of a less popular rival) were principled enough to say "you know what? No. We're not censoring." (as has been Google's policy until now) would Western governments meet them halfway and take a stand against rivals that were doing it elsewhere?
I believe that's what it would take to level the playing field (and I admit I could be naive here), but the suggestion itself is preposterous. No western government is ever going to place what would amount to an embargo on a search engine over them censoring results in another country.
I hear what people are saying about user's will vote with their feet (or hands as it were), and that Google is safe with their already dominant position, but I don't think history supports that view.
I also don't think the average user cares that much if someone else is getting censored thousands of miles away. Maybe I'm cynical, but people at large just don't care about this stuff, and I say this as someone who cares deeply about it.
(How many people outside of tech remember Edward Snowden? I'm sure they'll recall the name but I'd be surprised if you'd hear more than "was that the Russian spy guy?")
I really hope Google won't submit to censoring in China, I just think it's likely they will.
And it sucks.
And it sucks more that I believe it'll happen.
2. China steals source code and gives to Baidu
3. China kicks Google out of China
I don't want to be relying on the broken windows fallacy here however. We don't know the extent to which the Chinese government wants Google to comply. Since there are already a bunch of comments speculating the negatives, we can do the same with the positives.
Let's look at the potential benefits of existing in China. Results will be censored, there's no getting around that, but unfavorable, yet uncensored, results can be prioritized. Support for Chinese related tools might improve due to the increase in data. Translation could see a quality improvement for one of the most spoken languages in the world. Google may see an increase in revenue, potentially creating more jobs. Ads in China may provide an easier entry way for Americans to advertise there. I'm sure the list goes on.
I can’t find a record of even just the Chinese side claiming they have “evicted” Google. Perhaps the “Google doesn’t want to censor; kick Google out” version of events makes more sense with each year just because it’s simpler. It also distorts reality, though, so I think reminding everyone (including myself) the more mainstream timeline is worth a moment.
Originally Google China was offering the censored version of search to users within China, which was a controversy. At some point a massive hack targeted Gmail accounts belonging to dissidents and activists of all kinds (from cryptography to Falun Gong religion). Google supposedly could’ve chosen to keep the breach to itself, but did made it public the next year and cited as a reason to reconsider its Chinese operations[0][1].
It’s true that Google’s competitors in search have continued to operate within Chinese market. They have been facing the same issues[2], and by the looks of the history of it many of similar events may well not be publicly known.
As of now the only Google service available within mainland China that I know of is Google Translate. I believe it’s made available via servers in China, as the latency seems on par with other local apps.
[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Aurora
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_China#Operation_Aurora_...
[2] https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2007/nov/14/news.yaho...
Why aren't they protesting about their technology potentially being abused during election cycles in US? That is something that hits closer to home for me.
There is some element of YouTube (and maybe Google Search results) returning things and suggesting things that are intended to lead people towards whomever is paying for those things to float to the top.
One the one hand, it's clearly a good sign that employees are comfortable doing this, as it could guide an enormous company to do better things for the world, and the lack of a contractual Sword of Damocles over their continued employment encourages the free flow of information and conversation.
On the other...were the first two times that your employer was found to be engaged in behavior you found to be morally bankrupt not enough? At some point, it's the rule, not the exception.
* (primarily because cn gov requested extensive access to their infrastructure, claims of attempted or partially successful break-in attempts, etc. When they ceased all censorship in China the decision was already made to leave, it was just for show.)