
Google CEO Sundar Pichai warns employees: Don't get too political - mike22223333
https://www.businessinsider.com/google-ceo-sundar-pichai-warns-employees-not-to-get-too-political-2018-9
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emayljames
It seems to be okay for google to get political, lobbying politicians and
writing them cheques in the premise of getting backhand favours.

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ttonkytonk
.. Which is accepted practice for companies in general. But why?

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pmiller2
Because the Supreme Court decided that the legal fiction that corporations are
people extends giving them free speech rights. Tellingly, money counts as
speech in America.

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prolikewh0a
Google is showing the hands of private government. How authoritarian will
Americans let their employers become?

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pmiller2
Most Americans would find a job loss to be a total financial disaster. This
gives employers the ability to be as authoritarian as they want, more or less.
Toe the line or be out of a job (and lose health insurance, possibly risk
homelessness, etc.) is a powerful coercive mechanism. In many states, people
can be fired for political activity outside of work.

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prolikewh0a
Chomsky points this out in this [1] interview.

>Incidentally, there’s an interesting book that just came out finally, says
some of the obvious things about this, by a woman named Elizabeth Anderson.
She’s a philosopher and an economist. It’s called Private Government or some
name like that, but her point is that, which is a major point, yes, there is a
government, but governments can be repressive. But most of our lives are under
private government, which she says are indistinguishable from communist
dictatorships.

>Any business, for example. If you subject yourself to it, you become
essentially a slave of the institution with no rights, give away your liberty,
and so on.

>....And when the Industrial Revolution came along, everything changed. You
could only survive by being subordinate to a major corporate structure, and
wage labor became the norm.

[1] [https://taibbi.substack.com/p/preface-an-interview-with-
noam...](https://taibbi.substack.com/p/preface-an-interview-with-noam-chomsky-
the-fairway)

~~~
pmiller2
Specifically, the concept of being so beholden to an employer as to be
essentially forced to obey their (nearly) every whim is called “wage
slavery”[0]. While it’s not nearly as bad as the days of the “company town,”
[1], when workers could be paid in company scrip good only at company
stores[2], while renting company living quarters, more people are wage slaves
today than will admit it, and they get angry when you suggest they are!

[0]:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wage_slavery](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wage_slavery)

[1]:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Company_town](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Company_town)

[2]:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Company_store](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Company_store)

~~~
GW150914
Aren’t some of these mega corps contemplating building their own employee
cities? We could see people forced to re-learn just what a company town
implies, and all out of a drive to centralize in SV and lower housing costs.

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w_t_payne
If a Google employee changes the search algorithm without the knowledge of his
manager, how would we ever know?

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bertil
I don’t think that you can do that without attracting the attention of other
programmers:

\- You have to ask for a review.

\- Even if you find a like-minded programmer, most key parts of the code are
flagged by senior programmers who get alerted where there is a significant
change.

\- Assuming this goes through, any significant change in which websites get
listed, clicked on, etc. will be flagged by an anomaly-detection tool.

Changing anything impactful requires to pass through a lot of internal radars,
certainly far more sensitive, informed and exhaustive than anything external.

~~~
w_t_payne
Do you think that this is enough to convince a hostile sceptic?

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grigjd3
So this article is being blown out of proportion. Pichai's letter is just
saying that Google employees should act in a professional manner, not that
they shouldn't have political views or be involved in politics.

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avmich
> "The trust our users place in us is our greatest asset and we must always
> protect it. If any Googler ever undermines that trust, we will hold them
> accountable."

I'd always assume the server farm to handle my search request would be
stateless. Whom in Google should Sundar hold accountable if that's not the
case?

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sunstone
Finger wagging Google's super smart employees is unlikely to work out well.

