8 ms·

When I worked at a FAANG, anti-censorship and pro free speech was normative. What happened? Why have we let a small number of intolerant activists scare us into

When I worked at a FAANG, anti-censorship and pro free speech was normative. What happened? Why have we let a small number of intolerant activists scare us into silence?

nightski 5y ago
Part of it is being scared. But in the world of 24/7 surveillance I think it's more that anything you say can haunt you for the rest of your life. It's not OK to make mistakes or slip up because it's captured and stored forever. People aren't allowed to debate, learn, and change.
- pianoben 5y ago
  Anecdotally, most of my interactions with friends has moved offline. I wonder whether that's a broader trend, and whether it will be sustainable? Like, in the same way I learned not to post personal stuff on Livejournal (then MySpace and Facebook), will we just... log off half the time, and treat the rest as a resume? Or will we hole up in private discords/IRC/Matrix/etc groups? (* and for anyone wondering, we're all fairly left-leaning, pro-social-justice people. we're not hiding from Cancel Culture, we just feel more free in smaller groups.)
  - pixl97 5y ago
    Is it really offline when one device could be listening to the entire thing?
    - pianoben 5y ago
      Basically, yeah. There's no expectation of permanence like there is with social media. Recording/transcribing and publishing would be a gross violation of trust. Someone could point a directional microphone at you in the park, too, but one doesn't typically worry about that.
      - KirillPanov 5y ago
        Them pointing a microphone at you in a park takes planning, effort, work, and people, which is why it doesn't happen often. When you've volunteered to carry and point the microphone yourself it's a totally different ball game.
slver 5y ago
The flip side is what exactly do you need to say that you're silenced from saying. Our natural instinct to enter debates and "win" them really leads otherwise smart people astray as well. Let the activists yap. And you do what you want to do. We've evolved to speak not to win arguments, but to coordinate our actions better. And actions still speak loudest.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- Siira 5y ago
  > We've evolved to speak not to win arguments, but to coordinate Extraordinary generalizations require extraordinary evidence.
- slindz 5y ago
  For me, it's less about having things I need to say and more about endlessly analyzing what I'm about to say. There is little, if any, forgiveness for the well-intentioned mistakes.
tick_tock_tick 5y ago
College's changed; It used to be free speech focused with debates and exposure to a wide set of ideas being seen as critical to a well rounded education. Now you can't even get vaguely controversial speakers on campus. Tech workers tend to be younger so the more recent changes to the political views of colleges effect them first. Hell famous comedians won't even preform at college campuses anymore: https://www.cheatsheet.com/entertainment/jerry-seinfeld-reveals-why-he-cant-perform-stand-up-comedy-on-college-campuses-they-dont-know-what-the-hell-theyre-talking-about.html/ https://www.cheatsheet.com/entertainment/jerry-seinfeld-reve...
- pope_meat 5y ago
  ...I laughed. Billionaire Jerry Seinfeld can't seem to relate to the kids these days, blames the kids.
  - throwkeep 5y ago
    A couple points... College campuses are where you are supposed to be confronted with challenging ideas and different perspectives. That's one of their great gifts. But even mainstream Jerry Seinfeld, who created one of the most popular sitcoms of all time and doesn't even swear, is now considered too controversial? It's not just him. Dave Chappelle and many other comedians have been saying the same thing about college audiences.
    - pope_meat 5y ago
      You living in the wrong decade still. Jerry Seinfeld was relevant in the 90s, and Chappelle in the 2000s. Jerry keeps dating 18 year old girls, and Chappelle can't seem to restrain himself from shitting on trans folks. Sorry, these heroes suck.
      - dragonwriter 5y ago
        > Jerry keeps dating 18 year old girls AFAIK, he is only know to have done that once (and they first met and went out, though Seinfeld said later that they weren't “dating” yet, when she was 17, not 18.)
btilly 5y ago
Read https://s3.documentcloud.org/documents/3914586/Googles-Ideological-Echo-Chamber.pdf https://s3.documentcloud.org/documents/3914586/Googles-Ideol.... Then read https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google%27s_Ideological_Echo_Chamber https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google%27s_Ideological_Echo_Ch... for what happened when a Google engineer wrote that. Regardless of whether you agree or disagree with Damore, he was engaged in free speech. What he said is supported by a significant body of research and researchers. (And opposed by others - as it often the case on controversial topics.) And yet, he was fired and made an example of. Anyone who publicly says that he had a point got shot down both within companies like Google, and on various discussion forums like this one. I don't know how or when we lost tolerance for free speech, both as an industry and as a society. But the Damore incident is when I realized that we have.
- Miner49er 5y ago
  I don't think this is anything new for society. Companies have always fired people for going against the company too much or in the wrong way.
- Barrin92 5y ago
  >I don't know how or when we lost tolerance for free speech, both as an industry and as a society. But the Damore incident is when I realized that we have. The tech industry was just an exception for a decade or so because it was fairly non-corporate. Go to any conservative law firm or traditional management and try to start a fiery political debate, and see how that goes. There was never any lively democratic discourse or tolerance in any corporate environment, or any other private environment for that matter, ask any gay person that's older than 25 and doesn't live in a liberal state. George Carlin made a career of saying 'shit' on television, that's how free-wheeling discourse was. Also as a sidenote on that Damore debacle, he got canned because of his presentation. You can cite 100 studies, when you start to argue that women drop out of high stress jobs because they're neurotic you might as well commit seppuku. He should have passed that manifesto by someone who isn't on the spectrum because anyone could have seen that trainwreck coming a mile away.
  - goldenchrome 5y ago
wutbrodo 5y ago
I left Google in 2015, and I started to notice the flip from liberalism to illiberalism around 2012-2013. I still remember how weird it was the first time I heard someone on Memegen say that due process (ie, trying to understand whether a complaint occurred) was a legal constraint that Google didn't need to adhere to when adjudicating intra-employee complaints (eg harassing comments). IMO it's pretty straightforward, in Google's case at least. They scaled wildly in terms of headcount (I think they have a bit under 10x the headcount they had when I joined), right when competition for the best tech employees exploded. They obviously had to lower their bar[1] significantly to keep growing, and they ended up scooping up masses of coastal urban[2] midwits, precisely the population that was most susceptible to and hit hardest by the religious awakening that occurred in the early 2010s. A bit more speculatively, there's some evidence that higher cognitive ability is correlated with support for free speech[3] and other tenets of liberalism, so any company going from a highly-selected-for-intelligence employee base to a dumber one has a built-in backlash against liberalism/pluralism/open-mindedness/etc. [1] I'm not suggesting that a binary switch was flipped, and that I personally made it in right before they started dumbing down their hiring. I wouldn't be surprised if the bar was higher a few years before I joined, and I can't say whether I would've met that bar. It's an iterative process that sped up over time and the company started to suffer the cumulative effect in the quality of their employee body. [2] This isn't implying that being coastal and urban makes you stupid. I myself am very much coastal and urban and have been my entire life. These are just the areas that were hit hardest by these ideologies, and "midwits" (to borrow a term from Taleb) are fertile ground for new mass movements. [3] https://www.psypost.org/2020/05/higher-levels-of-cognitive-ability-linked-to-stronger-support-for-freedom-of-speech-56812 https://www.psypost.org/2020/05/higher-levels-of-cognitive-a...
- cnvml 5y ago
  Truth is downvoted. There are tons of people hired after 2012 who aren't that great and survive on being political losers. The politician needs a framework to control other people and fake enforced wokeness serves that purpose quite well.
  - wutbrodo 5y ago
efitz 5y ago
Large corporations are very pro censorship and anti free speech these days. Amazon bans books even though it’s the worlds biggest bookstore. AWS, Apple and Google all ban businesses, apps and content that they don’t like through selective enforcement of TOU. Netflix and Prime Video refuse to carry certain content. Inside these companies, a few loud voices control the Overton window, and management kowtows to them either enthusiastically (many of them agree) or at least resignedly (easier than taking the bull by the horns and potentially alienating large swathes of employees or customers. The reason that radical ideas with marginal support have this level of impact is the total recalcitrance and volume of the proponents. I don’t need to reason with you; i just need to shout you down and label you a moral pariah (“racist”, “white supremacist”, “climate denier”, etc). Natural self-censorship will cause almost everyone to shut up so I don’t unleash on them too.
LatteLazy 5y ago
They went mainstream. As soon as your trying to sell kids TV (on Netflix, YouTube, Apple/Amazon TV etc) suddenly your have to be 110% boring and vanilla. No more space for constructive disagreement or controversial content. Just colourful shapes and a laugh track please.
arkh 5y ago
> What happened? HR happened. At first HR is viewed as an afterthought and it doubles as an easy way to get women in your tech company. But after some growth they usually get their hands on the power of hiring and firing people. It's just downhill from there.
- TeMPOraL 5y ago
  HR? Or PR? It's easy to allow and promote freedom of expressing thoughts, any thoughts, even controversial thoughts, if you're an underdog in an underdog industry, whose existence and success depends on being free to think up and try weird things. FAANG of today is not that. FAANG is a bunch of good ol' megacorps now[0]. They're very sensitive about their stock price, about their relationships with investors, customer base. These things are strongly and negatively affected by media controversies, so corps obviously want to minimize such stories. This is how you get a trigger-happy HR: they become the internal enforcement arm of company's ongoing PR efforts. I haven't seen a company that's actually ruled by their HR department. All I've seen is HR protecting their company - and the way this protection looks depends on the company's position and culture. They will absolutely fight for freedom of expression for as long as the company itself needs it to survive and grow. -- [0] - I think it's important to repeat because people old enough to remember how they started, who were adjacent to hacker culture back then, sometimes cling to that image of a bunch of geeks trying to make something about the world better. I know I do, I have to keep reminding myself that Big Tech is just a collection of run-of-the-mill multinationals. They may happen to employ a lot of software developers, some (few) of which work on cutting-edge problems, but they're just corporations, like all other corporations, like all the corporations the hacker culture of yore used to mock.

When I worked at a FAANG, anti-censorship and pro free speech was normative. What happened? Why have we let a small number of intolerant activists scare us into silence?

nightski 5y ago

Part of it is being scared. But in the world of 24/7 surveillance I think it's more that anything you say can haunt you for the rest of your life. It's not OK to make mistakes or slip up because it's captured and stored forever. People aren't allowed to debate, learn, and change.

pianoben 5y ago
Anecdotally, most of my interactions with friends has moved offline. I wonder whether that's a broader trend, and whether it will be sustainable? Like, in the same way I learned not to post personal stuff on Livejournal (then MySpace and Facebook), will we just... log off half the time, and treat the rest as a resume? Or will we hole up in private discords/IRC/Matrix/etc groups? (* and for anyone wondering, we're all fairly left-leaning, pro-social-justice people. we're not hiding from Cancel Culture, we just feel more free in smaller groups.)
- pixl97 5y ago
  Is it really offline when one device could be listening to the entire thing?
  - pianoben 5y ago
    Basically, yeah. There's no expectation of permanence like there is with social media. Recording/transcribing and publishing would be a gross violation of trust. Someone could point a directional microphone at you in the park, too, but one doesn't typically worry about that.
    - KirillPanov 5y ago
      Them pointing a microphone at you in a park takes planning, effort, work, and people, which is why it doesn't happen often. When you've volunteered to carry and point the microphone yourself it's a totally different ball game.

slver 5y ago

The flip side is what exactly do you need to say that you're silenced from saying. Our natural instinct to enter debates and "win" them really leads otherwise smart people astray as well. Let the activists yap. And you do what you want to do. We've evolved to speak not to win arguments, but to coordinate our actions better. And actions still speak loudest.

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
Siira 5y ago
> We've evolved to speak not to win arguments, but to coordinate Extraordinary generalizations require extraordinary evidence.
slindz 5y ago
For me, it's less about having things I need to say and more about endlessly analyzing what I'm about to say. There is little, if any, forgiveness for the well-intentioned mistakes.

tick_tock_tick 5y ago

College's changed; It used to be free speech focused with debates and exposure to a wide set of ideas being seen as critical to a well rounded education. Now you can't even get vaguely controversial speakers on campus. Tech workers tend to be younger so the more recent changes to the political views of colleges effect them first. Hell famous comedians won't even preform at college campuses anymore: https://www.cheatsheet.com/entertainment/jerry-seinfeld-reveals-why-he-cant-perform-stand-up-comedy-on-college-campuses-they-dont-know-what-the-hell-theyre-talking-about.html/ https://www.cheatsheet.com/entertainment/jerry-seinfeld-reve...

pope_meat 5y ago
...I laughed. Billionaire Jerry Seinfeld can't seem to relate to the kids these days, blames the kids.
- throwkeep 5y ago
  A couple points... College campuses are where you are supposed to be confronted with challenging ideas and different perspectives. That's one of their great gifts. But even mainstream Jerry Seinfeld, who created one of the most popular sitcoms of all time and doesn't even swear, is now considered too controversial? It's not just him. Dave Chappelle and many other comedians have been saying the same thing about college audiences.
  - pope_meat 5y ago
    You living in the wrong decade still. Jerry Seinfeld was relevant in the 90s, and Chappelle in the 2000s. Jerry keeps dating 18 year old girls, and Chappelle can't seem to restrain himself from shitting on trans folks. Sorry, these heroes suck.
    - dragonwriter 5y ago
      > Jerry keeps dating 18 year old girls AFAIK, he is only know to have done that once (and they first met and went out, though Seinfeld said later that they weren't “dating” yet, when she was 17, not 18.)

btilly 5y ago

Read https://s3.documentcloud.org/documents/3914586/Googles-Ideological-Echo-Chamber.pdf https://s3.documentcloud.org/documents/3914586/Googles-Ideol.... Then read https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google%27s_Ideological_Echo_Chamber https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google%27s_Ideological_Echo_Ch... for what happened when a Google engineer wrote that. Regardless of whether you agree or disagree with Damore, he was engaged in free speech. What he said is supported by a significant body of research and researchers. (And opposed by others - as it often the case on controversial topics.) And yet, he was fired and made an example of. Anyone who publicly says that he had a point got shot down both within companies like Google, and on various discussion forums like this one. I don't know how or when we lost tolerance for free speech, both as an industry and as a society. But the Damore incident is when I realized that we have.

Miner49er 5y ago
I don't think this is anything new for society. Companies have always fired people for going against the company too much or in the wrong way.
Barrin92 5y ago
>I don't know how or when we lost tolerance for free speech, both as an industry and as a society. But the Damore incident is when I realized that we have. The tech industry was just an exception for a decade or so because it was fairly non-corporate. Go to any conservative law firm or traditional management and try to start a fiery political debate, and see how that goes. There was never any lively democratic discourse or tolerance in any corporate environment, or any other private environment for that matter, ask any gay person that's older than 25 and doesn't live in a liberal state. George Carlin made a career of saying 'shit' on television, that's how free-wheeling discourse was. Also as a sidenote on that Damore debacle, he got canned because of his presentation. You can cite 100 studies, when you start to argue that women drop out of high stress jobs because they're neurotic you might as well commit seppuku. He should have passed that manifesto by someone who isn't on the spectrum because anyone could have seen that trainwreck coming a mile away.
- goldenchrome 5y ago

wutbrodo 5y ago

I left Google in 2015, and I started to notice the flip from liberalism to illiberalism around 2012-2013. I still remember how weird it was the first time I heard someone on Memegen say that due process (ie, trying to understand whether a complaint occurred) was a legal constraint that Google didn't need to adhere to when adjudicating intra-employee complaints (eg harassing comments). IMO it's pretty straightforward, in Google's case at least. They scaled wildly in terms of headcount (I think they have a bit under 10x the headcount they had when I joined), right when competition for the best tech employees exploded. They obviously had to lower their bar[1] significantly to keep growing, and they ended up scooping up masses of coastal urban[2] midwits, precisely the population that was most susceptible to and hit hardest by the religious awakening that occurred in the early 2010s. A bit more speculatively, there's some evidence that higher cognitive ability is correlated with support for free speech[3] and other tenets of liberalism, so any company going from a highly-selected-for-intelligence employee base to a dumber one has a built-in backlash against liberalism/pluralism/open-mindedness/etc. [1] I'm not suggesting that a binary switch was flipped, and that I personally made it in right before they started dumbing down their hiring. I wouldn't be surprised if the bar was higher a few years before I joined, and I can't say whether I would've met that bar. It's an iterative process that sped up over time and the company started to suffer the cumulative effect in the quality of their employee body. [2] This isn't implying that being coastal and urban makes you stupid. I myself am very much coastal and urban and have been my entire life. These are just the areas that were hit hardest by these ideologies, and "midwits" (to borrow a term from Taleb) are fertile ground for new mass movements. [3] https://www.psypost.org/2020/05/higher-levels-of-cognitive-ability-linked-to-stronger-support-for-freedom-of-speech-56812 https://www.psypost.org/2020/05/higher-levels-of-cognitive-a...

cnvml 5y ago
Truth is downvoted. There are tons of people hired after 2012 who aren't that great and survive on being political losers. The politician needs a framework to control other people and fake enforced wokeness serves that purpose quite well.
- wutbrodo 5y ago

efitz 5y ago

Large corporations are very pro censorship and anti free speech these days. Amazon bans books even though it’s the worlds biggest bookstore. AWS, Apple and Google all ban businesses, apps and content that they don’t like through selective enforcement of TOU. Netflix and Prime Video refuse to carry certain content. Inside these companies, a few loud voices control the Overton window, and management kowtows to them either enthusiastically (many of them agree) or at least resignedly (easier than taking the bull by the horns and potentially alienating large swathes of employees or customers. The reason that radical ideas with marginal support have this level of impact is the total recalcitrance and volume of the proponents. I don’t need to reason with you; i just need to shout you down and label you a moral pariah (“racist”, “white supremacist”, “climate denier”, etc). Natural self-censorship will cause almost everyone to shut up so I don’t unleash on them too.

LatteLazy 5y ago

They went mainstream. As soon as your trying to sell kids TV (on Netflix, YouTube, Apple/Amazon TV etc) suddenly your have to be 110% boring and vanilla. No more space for constructive disagreement or controversial content. Just colourful shapes and a laugh track please.

arkh 5y ago

> What happened? HR happened. At first HR is viewed as an afterthought and it doubles as an easy way to get women in your tech company. But after some growth they usually get their hands on the power of hiring and firing people. It's just downhill from there.

TeMPOraL 5y ago
HR? Or PR? It's easy to allow and promote freedom of expressing thoughts, any thoughts, even controversial thoughts, if you're an underdog in an underdog industry, whose existence and success depends on being free to think up and try weird things. FAANG of today is not that. FAANG is a bunch of good ol' megacorps now[0]. They're very sensitive about their stock price, about their relationships with investors, customer base. These things are strongly and negatively affected by media controversies, so corps obviously want to minimize such stories. This is how you get a trigger-happy HR: they become the internal enforcement arm of company's ongoing PR efforts. I haven't seen a company that's actually ruled by their HR department. All I've seen is HR protecting their company - and the way this protection looks depends on the company's position and culture. They will absolutely fight for freedom of expression for as long as the company itself needs it to survive and grow. -- [0] - I think it's important to repeat because people old enough to remember how they started, who were adjacent to hacker culture back then, sometimes cling to that image of a bunch of geeks trying to make something about the world better. I know I do, I have to keep reminding myself that Big Tech is just a collection of run-of-the-mill multinationals. They may happen to employ a lot of software developers, some (few) of which work on cutting-edge problems, but they're just corporations, like all other corporations, like all the corporations the hacker culture of yore used to mock.