this post was submitted on 30 Jan 2024
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Has there been a company that has experienced such a fast fall from grace as Google?
Mere years ago they were viewed as the bastion of intellectuals in tech. They worked on stuff that was deemed "not evil", people that worked there were deemed the best and brightest, and their culture was celebrated so highly that literal movies have been made about working there.
Obviously, the reality is different from the vision, but in a short amount of time they've implemented URA, have had multiple mass layoffs where people were locked out overnight with no more than a sentence in an email after a decade of work, have doubled-down on enshitification of their services, and have alienated a significant chunk of their workers through RTO and cost cutting.
Anyone who bought into the don't be evil story / marketing is being willfully naive. Like all the big tech companies they're basically intelligence fronts. Big tech is big brother. You don't even have to look hard to see how intertwined with the CIA / NSA Google had been from the beginning. Furthermore, Snowden's exposure of PRISM made it clear that it wasn't just a few grants early on, it was setup by design to limit govt liability yet allow mass surveillance to go on unabated and the entire launch of Gmail is yet a single token example. Don't trust big tech.
Maybe, but I do believe at least then being aspirationaly not evil made it a much different company. It made people try to be better both in and outside google even if at some level it was still a big corp doing big corp things.
Whatever it is now is a boring husk of what it was and I think you can draw a line from that to those naive people and their belief in that principle trying to make awesome things and a better world.
Maybe that's just me looking back with rose colored glasses though.