Working for Google

The political culture is stifling. The controversy over the Dalmore memo does not give a full picture of how the left wing ‘progressive’ perspective is being pushed. There are numerous anti-bias, diversity, and inclusiveness training sessions. While I don’t think that some training on fighting bias is completely useless (e.g., for interviewers), the problem is that the perspective is unabashedly cultural marxist. We have a lecture series on race that features such noted scholars as Shaun King, Van Jones, and Linda Sarsour. (They would rather bite their limbs off than let people like Thomas Sowell or Walter Williams join the conversation). I won’t even mention all the left wing causes that are constantly pushed in calls to volunteer,  community collaboration opportunities, emails from upper level managers on the need for diversity & inclusion, etc.

It is not just conservatives who have to hide their beliefs. Libertarians and people from different cultures (e.g., Hindu, Muslim) also keep very quiet. For instance, it would be a faux pas to admit that you don’t believe in state-sponsored gay marriage because you don’t believe that the state should have any role in recognizing marriages of any sort (i.e., that it is a purely cultural or private matter that transcends the state’s mandate). The response would be that you are denying rights to gay people, and you would probably be regarded as homophobic. There is no shortage of people willing to take offense, and they are incentivized to do so.

This matters for a number of reasons. As Breitbart accurately reports, various left-leaning managers are maintaining blacklists of individuals who are not “sufficiently supportive of diversity”. They are so secure in their position that they proclaim these stances openly on our internal G+. (This is something out of Maoist China, where not being sufficiently supportive of the Chairman could get you in trouble, and snitching was encouraged). They encourage each other to report ‘suspicious’ behaviour, and proudly announce to all and sundry that they are more than willing to share this information across companies in the tech sector to create industry-wide blacklists. There is, as Breitbart reported (and which I was unaware of), a labour relations complaint against the head of Technical Infrastructure for ‘witch-hunting’ dissenters within his org.

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Some of the most obvious victims of this stifling left-wing culture are probably religious minorities. I first found out about this accidentally, while chatting to a psychologist who works for a mental health organization contracted by tech companies. She told me that a huge portion of her caseload consisted of minority-member Googlers who were stressed out and angered by the requirement to conform to Google’s left wing culture (e.g., Muslim employees and the omnipresent pro-LGBT-etc propaganda).

Ironically, despite the emails from management telling us that stereotypes are bad, the official guide to fairness in performance reviews is chock full of stereotypes. In the opening pages, we are told that white (dominant) culture values binary thinking, meritocracy, perfection and urgency. In contrast, it “commonly invisibilizes or devalues” listening, collaboration, sustainability, growth in quality, self-determination, etc.

The authors of this document are apparently unaware that it was actually white male ecologists who researched and developed models of sustainability and resilience (e.g., C.S. Holling). Models of collaboration and inclusion of different viewpoints appeared in the urban planning and socio-ecological systems literature back in the 1970s, again largely championed by white people (e.g., Arnstein, Jacobs). You can thank white researchers for complex adaptive systems theory, chaos theory, participatory planning methods, models of organizational decision making, etc. On the topic of ‘binary thinking’, white males (e.g., Lukasiewicz) were developing axiomatic theories of many-valued logics way back in the 1930s, while the same demographic developed probability theory, stochastic processes, fuzzy logic and various other formalisms.

However, of this can be pointed out. We just have to eat the propaganda.

And lest you think that this is just an internal company matter, check out who is going to be ‘fighting extremism’ on YouTube.

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