Big changes can sometimes begin with small events, like Google last week firing 28 pro-Hamas employees who had "occupied" two of the company's offices in New York City and in Sunnyvale, Calif. The move was unexpected, to say the least. In 2018, Google caved to similar employee demands, "killed a Pentagon program called Project Maven," and swore off ever working with that evil U.S. military on AI again.
To call Google "woke" is to call Presidentish Joe Biden "a little slower lately."
"It’s hard to overstate what a dramatic turnabout this is for Google," Fortune Crypto editor Jeff John Roberts wrote on Monday, "where activism has been part of the corporate culture since its start-up days."
"Activism" is a nice way of saying "progressive conformity above all, including reputation and profits." Stick a pin in that little jab because I'll come back to it in a moment.
Giving 28 pro-Hamas tantrum-throwers their walking papers might have been the least of Google's actions. Alphabet (Google's parent company) CEO Sundar Pichai signaled a new direction for the company in a corporate blog post just one day later.
We have a culture of vibrant, open discussion that enables us to create amazing products and turn great ideas into action. That's important to preserve. But ultimately we are a workplace and our policies and expectations are clear: this is a business, and not a place to act in a way that disrupts coworkers or makes them feel unsafe, to attempt to use the company as a personal platform, or to fight over disruptive issues or debate politics.
We can quibble over whether Alphabet has "a culture of vibrant, open discussion" because, frankly, they don't.
Maybe Pichai should look to Coinbase for an example of what to do next.
The firings were applauded online by cryptocurrency exchange company Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong, who steered his business away from Woke starting in 2020. Back then, Armstrong required his employees to swear off politics at work and offered generous separation packages for those who wouldn't or couldn't. Armstrong made Coinbase a "mission first" company — a near-heresy in Silicon Valley.
Armstrong on Friday called Google's firings "a great start" but warned that "it will probably take much more than this [to] fully correct" Google's sometimes comical descent into Wokeness, including its failed Gemini AI image generator.
"Life is so much better on the other side," Armstrong tweeted/posted for Pichai's benefit. "Get back to pure merit and tech innovation like early Google.”
Aside from last week's memo, Pichai has been silent, not responding to any of Armstrong's gentle ribbing.
But if Pichai is done tolerating Woke temper tantrums like last week's and is serious about Google's "duty to be an objective and trusted provider of information that serves all of our users," that's potentially very good news.
Full Disclosure: I don't own any shares in Google although I do own shares in a couple of tech-oriented mutual funds that probably do. But I've been nothing but brutal in my opinions about the company and the harm it's done to PJ Media and our parent company.
It could be very good news not just for Alphabet, but for users, shareholders, and the entire right side of the internet, whose ad revenue is held hostage to Google's Woke whims.
Potentially, let me stress again.
So don't get me wrong. I'm not holding my breath, expecting Google to drop all of the Woke garbage all at once, or to stop robbing my company of advertising income any time we cross some invisible and arbitrary line of theirs.
But even baby steps like last week's should be applauded and encouraged.
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