Google employees can’t just walk away from ethical tradeoffs like Dragonfly
techcrunch.com
techcrunch.com
Nevertheless, industrial action has had a long history of bringing about meaningful reform so I can't say I agree with the author even on practical grounds.
That's just because companies are compelled to prioritize shareholder value and profit has much higher impact on that than ethics.
Employees pushing for anything won't work. You'd have to create a way for ethics to influence stock price and how much of companies profits shareholders are entitled to get.
But for that ethics would have to be codified... Law?
With the great, big, giant exception of unions.
No, this is just an excuse.
Investors could sue. They could also sue because they think the ethical violations cost google money. They could sue for any other stupid reason.
Companies have a lot of leeway in maximizing shareholder value. Amazon has pursued growth over short term profits for decades.
Not all unethics are equally unethical. I applaud anyone who stops doing something they think is evil, even if my lines are drawn differently.
It’s fair to say there are those that want Mountain View to be Capitol Hill. They want politics to be a focal point of the tech industry in Silicon Valley. They want their worldview to be incorporated in what’s produced. It’s a convoluted path with a lot of tip-toeing around.
This is also why there is motivation for employees to continuously dig up dirt on Google and leak it to The Intercept: because the group wants to make it political. Wouldn’t it feel great to stand before a crowd and say “I fought ‘the man’” over “I decided to walk away”? Broadly speaking, who is the fight actually against?
There’s more news (at least in the tech circle) about employee protest of Dragonfly than what Dragonly actually is or how it works. Clearly it’s censored, which puts people off, but what is Dragonfly censoring, how is the censoring done, and who keeps track of what is censored? Given China already has Baidu running (which I will over-simplistically call Google’s knockoff), this isn’t China’s first rodeo with crafting a search engine, so there must be some cooperative development plan in place that is much less covered in these articles.
Further, the worldview expressed surrounding the concern of building a censored search engine for China often ignores that Chinese internet users aren’t all stupid. Yes, there is the Great Firewall. For 10+ years, that has not stopped users in China from finding “hacks” to access Google and censored websites, and share the information online. I understand the sentiment that access is still limited to many Chinese out there; however, from my experience of interacting with Chinese natives and ex-pats (which isn’t a perfect sample, but w/e), it’s not like Chinese people live under a rock as much as Westerners sometimes think. Even without Google, there is still a huge online culture in China.
I get that ethics is hardly a simple matter. The employees at Google can follow their own compasses. The real story is that a small group thinks their compass should be the direction everyone follows because it is “right”, and it’s being used on a project so publicly vague there’s more controversy than evidence.
Google isn't a "small group", they have huge control over society. Ethical decisions are made in countless companies, but few have as much reach as Google. As any organization grows and amasses power, they take on more responsibility to manage their ethical decisions well.
Your reference to China's great firewall doesn't really support your point. Sure, some can circumvent it, but it's still repressive. Why would anyone want to support that, especially from a company who's motto is to "free information"?
The UK, EU, US, China, Russia, as well as many east Asian and middle eastern countries all have their own censorship laws be it for defamation, heresy/blasphemy, right to be forgotten, restrict access to adult materials, varying levels of radical/fringe speech, diy weapons, end to encryption, as well as varying levels of general political speech and news coverage. Everyone wants the big platforms to censor fake news or just speech they don't like or the government to step in and force them to do so.
If we leave all of the markets speech and expression is restricted what do we have left and where should the line be drawn? Who sets the standards?
The worst thing about this is how easily this mechanism can be leveraged against our inclination to madly pattern match, and, worse(?), how we pick out the signals we like more than the ones we don't.
I'm not sure how to deal with this yet, but I am skeptical that total free speech is the best option right now. At least, we need to build new institutions and new media consumption habits before it becomes the best option. We need ways to deal with noise, be that individually or as communities.
My inclination is to say that we should push political discussions down to the local level in order increase the signal/noise ratio while maintaining free speech.
That fact forms a big part of some mainstream arguments for moral realism.
And when the US government decides to tell Google to flip on "dragonfly" locally then what? Anyone who would be against that sort of thing will be long gone following this kind of reasoning.
The idea that you are somehow creating change in China by refusing to interact with China is just stupid. It will only serve to have a negative affect on promoting your ethics. China is increasing its influence in the rest of the world and that includes its politics.
It's the same thought processes that people who don't vote because they don't like any of the candidates use. It's only detrimental to society.
"tech" has considered itself immune from criticism by framing all arguments against it as against progress itself - and who would be against progress? That kind of short-circuit evaluation led to people not really questioning things - might as well keep programming, after all, it is progress right?
Now the environment is much more complicated, and we're collectively discovering shades in what was originally a solid color. Interesting times.
But hey profits are profits