A protest outside Google’s offices in San Francisco, Thursday, December 14, 2023.
(Santiago Mejia / San Francisco Chronicle via AP)When I joined Google, over 20 years ago, it was just a start-up employing a few thousand people. It felt like we were committed to making something useful for society. When I first visited the Mountain View headquarters and saw people in Google-branded T-shirts, I thought the company must make engineers wear a uniform—why else would someone wear a shirt announcing where they work? I’d never seen or experienced this sense of passion for one’s employer, but I soon saw why: Every few months, a new product or feature would launch that offered a free and truly useful service (Gmail! Google Maps!).
But if my overwhelming feeling back then was pride, my feeling now is a very different one: heartbreak. That’s thanks to years of deeply troubling leadership decisions, from Google’s initial foray into military contracting with Project Maven, to the corporation’s more recent profit-driven partnerships like Project Nimbus, Google and Amazon’s joint $1.2 billion AI and cloud computing contract with the Israeli military that has powered Israel’s ongoing genocide of Palestinians in Gaza.
Today marks one year since workers with No Tech for Apartheid staged sit-ins at Google offices to protest the use of our labor to power the genocide in Gaza, to demand an end the harassment and discrimination of our Palestinian, Muslim, and Arab coworkers, and to pressure executives to address the workplace health and safety crisis that Nimbus has caused. Google retaliated against workers and illegally fired 50 Googlers—including many who did not participate directly in the action.
In the year since, Google has only deepened its commitment to being a military contractor. Two months ago, in order to take advantage of the federal contracts the corporation can gain under Trump, Google abandoned its pledge not to build AI for weapons or surveillance. In rapid succession, Google then acquired Israeli cloud security start-up Wiz, pursued partnerships with US Customs and Border Patrol to update towers by Israeli war contractor Elbit Systems with AI at the US-Mexico border, and launched an AI partnership with the largest war profiteer in the world: Lockheed Martin.
Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, and Raytheon are no longer the only war corporations in town; Google and big tech are increasingly eating their lunch. Big tech companies are being pushed by the market to continue to bank returns. But having saturated the consumer and enterprise markets, corporations like Google, in a contentious arms race to dominate the cloud market, have identified the ever-ballooning so-called “defense” budgets of the US and other governments as major pots for profit.
One thing is clear: We urgently need an AI arms embargo.
For years, I have organized internally against Google’s full turn toward war contracting. Along with other coworkers of conscience, we have followed official internal channels to raise concerns in attempts to steer the company in a better direction. Now, for the first time in my more than 20 years of working at Google, I feel driven to speak publicly, because our company is now powering state violence across the globe, and the severity of the harm being done is rapidly escalating.
Workers have always resisted the weaponization of technology, from the United Farm Workers campaigns leveraging boycotts, broader community organizing, and labor strikes to the Black American workers who organized the Polaroid Revolutionary Workers Movement against the use of Polaroid film technology in the passbooks of apartheid South Africa (and won). We can find a basis for treating solidarity as a workplace condition and organizing issue, and a way of building the necessary power not only to make small gains but to upend the power dynamic that allows our bosses to prioritize a genocide over our own voices.
To win victories in our struggle towards humane technology, we must act from a position of solidarity across our divisions: both with the structurally disempowered people in our workplaces and the communities that bear the brunt of the impact of the technologies, from Palestinians bombed by the AI platforms of Google and Amazon, to the workers in India facing contracts with 14-hour workdays, to the migrants being surveilled and tracked, to our own communities living under the microscope of police surveillance, to the coworkers we don’t see but who are surveilled and monitored in warehouse and data facilities to the point that they are unable to use the bathroom for fear of losing their job.
Only a strong, organized mass base of workers taking collective action together can end the militarization of our company. Workers have changed Google before. During Trump’s first administration, I joined my colleagues to organize against Project Maven, Google’s contract with the Department of Defense. We used our power as workers to force Google to drop the contract.
As workers, our power to effect change is found in one another. We not only have power when we come together, but also find community and purpose in collective struggle as a way to endure these dark times together. It is inspiring to be with other workers and grow our strength and courage together.
To my fellow Google workers, and tech workers at large: If we don’t act now, we will be conscripted into this administration’s fascist and cruel agenda: deporting immigrants and dissidents, stripping people of reproductive rights, rewriting the rules of our government and economy to favor Big Tech billionaires, and continuing to power the genocide of Palestinians.
As tech workers, we have a moral responsibility to resist complicity and the militarization of our work before it’s too late.
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