Tuesday, August 08, 2017

Google fires Dilbert

Being right isn't enough, you have to be Left.

James Damore, an engineer working at Google, has been fired for circulating a memorandum questioning his company's biases in monitoring and effectively legislating the opinions of its employees:

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-08-08/google-fires-employee-behind-controversial-diversity-memo

The workforce analyses are calibrated using something I've never heard of: "Googlegeist scores":

https://qz.com/97731/inside-googles-culture-of-relentless-self-surveying/

Interestingly (if you're nerdish), a Google search for this term this morning yielded 690 results, whereas Bing (which usually is far less helpful to me) showed 74,400:




Damore's sin was to suggest that generally, men are different from women and that this affects their work and lifestyle choices.

The memo is reproduced in full here:

http://www.wnd.com/2017/08/googles-ideological-echo-chamber/

- and here, updated with a statement from Google's VP in charge of "Diversity, Integrity & Governance":

https://gizmodo.com/exclusive-heres-the-full-10-page-anti-diversity-screed-1797564320

I liked Google when it was an Internet directory, not a spy-cum-censor.

Someone - Chadwick Gibson - has used the Googlegeist term as his site title, in a project to look at Google looking at us:

http://googlegeist.com/

"Gibson’s series Mirrors Behind the Curtain reveals the self-censored workings of this all-seeing, all-knowing medium. The screenshots in this series are rare glimpses of Google’s elusive Street View camera, busy at work, virtualizing the interiors of different museums, castles, and institutions of power around the world. Unlike normal street view though, in which Google’s car and camera have been easily masked out, the museums’ and castles’ plethora of mirrors present a situation where Google cannot cover its tracks. These images are ambivalent portraits of the often invisible, panoptic power of Google’s observation."

1 comment:

Sackerson said...

JD says:

Everyone in Silicon Valley is certifiably insane. The evidence is there to be seen in this programme from the BBC on sunday night-

http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b0916ghz/secrets-of-silicon-valley-series-1-1-the-disruptors

Unfortunately such over educated 'bright sparks' are everywhere these days. -

https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2017/08/geoengineers-meet-off-the-record/536004/

"Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge... etc etc"