谷歌之声：一位前员工回忆在Google的早期岁月

我在2007年夏天，从大学毕业后直接开始在谷歌工作，担任通讯部门的“新毕业生助理”。我工作的第一周，我和一百多名其他“Nooglers”（新谷歌员工）一起参加公司的每周员工会议T.G.I.F.，戴着统一发放的螺旋桨帽，作为一种仪式性的迎新。在Charlie的咖啡馆举行这个会议，这是一座位于“Googleplex”中心的多层礼堂，也就是公司位于加利福尼亚州山景城的庞大园区。这场活动感觉更像是每周集会——部分是脱口秀，部分是科学展览，部分是布道，整个活动都由桶装啤酒推动。

尽管有传说，谷歌办公室一开始并没有给人留下深刻印象。大部分园区是在前任租户因互联网泡沫破灭而撤出后快速改造的。结果是一个由矮小的一层或两层建筑组成的复合体，带有金属和玻璃外墙，周围是停车场的护城河，前面插着谷歌的标识。但园区也有很多便利设施可以指出——按摩室和小睡舱、恐龙化石、奇异的感官体验设施，如球坑、秋千和瑜伽球（即使似乎没人真正使用它们）。外国记者对午休理发或现场洗衣房等福利持怀疑态度，他们比美国同行更为谨慎，我听说有人把这种福利形容为让谷歌成为你的“家庭主妇”。

“一切都是为了控制员工的阴谋，不是吗？”一名法国记者说。

不过那时，我仍在学习如何用谷歌的视角看谷歌。我学会了回避这种问题，并对提问者感到有些同情，因为他们有些愤世嫉俗。

在随后的几年里，谷歌开始将 T.G.I.F. 会议直播到山景城校园的各个偏远建筑，以及美国国内和世界各地日益增长的卫星办公室。每周，我们都会为 Larry、Sergey 以及其他高管团队准备一份“预备简报”，列出公司内部可能在问答环节提出的热门话题，并提供建议的发言要点。我会翻阅内部邮件列表，看看那周有什么问题让谷歌员工感到激动——地图重设计、Gmail 垃圾邮件问题、公司内部托儿所价格上涨、管理层尝试通过移动 M&M 罐来推动健康饮食。如果某个问题非常有争议，它可能会产生一个“中心线程”，至少有一百条回复。我的工作不仅是观察公司内部的时代精神，还要学会如何应对它——阅读信息、提炼情绪温度，并设计高管的回应，以缓解冲击、恢复平静。

这种“谷歌之声”的工作——我破解出的一种带有个性的企业用语代码——慢慢变得炙手可热。公司在很大程度上依赖“文化”的话术来激励成千上万的员工全情投入、尽心尽力。如果工作要像一个家庭一样，那么它必须听起来像一个家庭——最大程度地友善、古怪、善良，富有谷歌特色。因此，在 2011 年初，当 Larry Page 成为 CEO，接替资深科技高管 Eric Schmidt 时，我被纳入团队，帮助制定 Larry 的内部沟通信息。

有迹象表明，谷歌正在变得臃肿且效率低下，例如，在一次 T.G.I.F. 会议上，有人指出有多个团队同时在研发智能手表。（最终，这些尝试都无法胜过 Apple Watch。）Larry 漫不经心地说，追赶竞争对手是一种死亡信号，但这似乎正是我们所做的一切。他经常说：“我们需要把更多的力量集中在更少的箭上”，重复着硅谷的老生常谈。问题是，箭矢不断增多——从无处出现，向各个方向飞去——即便是 Larry 也似乎无法控制它们。

Google+ 是一个短命的失败项目，但宣传却无孔不入。拉里吹嘘说，在邀请制发布仅两周后，该平台就拥有了一千万用户。到了秋季，这一数字达到了四千万，到 2012 年初则超过了两倍。拉里没有说的是，许多“用户”是在注册其他 Google 服务时几乎被迫创建了账户。用户参与度非常低。2018 年平台被关闭时，Google 承认，平均每位 Google+ 用户每次访问在平台上停留的时间不到五秒。这个地方几乎都是自动生成的个人资料，是一个数字化的假象村落。

在“让一切都社交化”的运动中，Google 最终毁掉了它曾经创造的少数真正社交化的东西之一：RSS 聚合器 Google Reader。Reader 虽不华丽，但拥有热情的用户群。按 Google 标准来说（仅按 Google 标准），它规模很小，据报道大约有三千万用户，其中许多人每天都活跃使用。它绝对是我最喜欢的 Google 产品，也是我唯一真正在线“社交”的地方；我每天都用它阅读网页内容、分享链接、与朋友们交流。我在 Hacker News 上看到一位 Googler 说，关闭 Reader 就像“精灵离开中土世界”那一刻。Memegen 被嘲讽刷屏：我们可以资助一个荒谬的月球计划，通过气球传送互联网（Project Loon），但我们却不能留几个工程师维护这个小项目吗？

我日益增长的怀疑态度开始渗入我的 T.G.I.F. 邮件中。邮件内容取决于你的看法，看起来半是礼拜仪式，半是恶搞：

如果一个外星人走进艺术博物馆，它不会认为那些抽象画是文艺复兴之前几千年就完成的吗？……快来参加一个拉康式镜像阶段的 TGIF，大家齐聚一堂，疯狂眨眼盯着倒影，并齐声喊道：“这就是 Google 的模样。”

公司权力结构的其他方面，以及我在其中不稳定的地位，开始逐渐明朗。2012年夏天，我调到创意实验室（Creative Lab）工作，这是一个备受追捧的纽约工作室，制作了一些谷歌的重要广告。我的上司凯文穿得像个小孩子——T恤、工装短裤、低帮运动鞋——还有配套的稚气短发。唯一显示他快四十岁的迹象是他脸色黄、神情沮丧以及吸血鬼般的黑眼圈。他经常用“shit”这个词：我们只是做点东西。我们做史诗级的东西。在我被录用前的第一次也是唯一一次面谈中，他几乎没有讨论我、我的工作或他设想我如何融入实验室，不过他确实以明显的赞赏口气说：“你显然理解谷歌的那套玩意儿。”我像是一名来自山景城的使者，或者说是象征物，这给了我一定的分量。但一旦我上岗，他就不再费心培训我。“只要多了解实验室，再把所有视频看一遍就行，”他说。他迟早会找到事情给我做的。

一个狂妄的自由职业者，凯文的另一家机构的朋友，在我入职不久后也加入，并立即被交付重要项目。他轻而易举地打破了凯文的防备，展现出我从未见过的他滑稽、放松的一面。两人不断嬉笑打趣，还会为提高下午的精力，跟着当年最火的歌曲Carly Rae Jepsen的‘Call Me Maybe’对嘴。我记得一个月后的一个偶遇，我在零食厨房碰到他，他说：“哦，我都忘了你存在了。”然后就匆匆去开下一个会议。当我向一位同事请教如何说服凯文“让我参与进来”时，他耸肩说，凯文是那种“男人中的男人”，喜欢和可以下班后一起喝啤酒的家伙一起工作。

实验室里大部分创意人员都是男性。有不少女性，但她们大多被安排在辅助岗位——管理预算、电子表格和日程，使整个机制运转。一位女性高管，也就是制作负责人，在我到达不久后就离开了，而我在那段时间里，整个实验室竟然没有一位女性创意总监。有一次，在全员大会上有人问到这一点。一位高管含糊地说了些套话，声称实验室是一个“独角兽魔法”般的地方，所以他们需要“格外确认”任何被雇用的人——也就是任何女性——都能获得成功。这被描述为明智的判断，而我们则恭敬地点头。谁能反对精英主义的逻辑呢？当我看到谷歌内部招聘人员发来的一封电子邮件时，我差点就要辞职了：YouTube（现为谷歌所有）在营销团队中有个职位难以填补，他们认为我非常适合。

我在YouTube的职位是“策展策略经理”，但YouTube并不是一个经过策展的地方。它是野性的、无限的、无法驯服的。在早期，该网站有更多的“主页编辑”，有专门的栏目，编辑会挑选有趣的内容进行展示。但YouTube早就意识到，算法能够更好地挑选视频，从每个用户那里榨取最长的“总观看时间”。据我了解，我们这些策展经理的存在，是为了给算法增加人类因素，用我们的见解来塑造算法，从而判断什么是好内容。我们的团队与工程部门有一个共同项目，本质上是一个无限生成的计算机播放列表。机器会在网站上进行抓取，显示最受欢迎的内容并过滤掉任何冒险内容，然后我们再补充那些可能被遗漏的内容。我的上司，另一位Kevin，指示我将视线从YouTube转移到Twitter、Reddit和Digg，看当天有哪些YouTube视频正在热门。这个练习大多是徒劳的：真的很难找到机器没有发现的内容。

凯文曾做过一次名为《为什么视频会走红》的TED演讲，这次演讲引起了YouTube管理层的广泛关注，而他也逐渐安顿下来，成为公司的常驻发言人。他是一位互联网表情包和现象的熟练总结者：“江南Style：https://www.newyorker.com/culture/cultural-comment/the-door-opened-by-gangnam-style”，键盘猫，“查理咬我的手指”——YouTube最早、最不具争议的热门视频。他有酒窝且上镜，说话时自信且有一种无所不知的态度，尤其在谈论互联网潮流时。他声称自己发明了政治剪辑视频的类型，这一说法既难以验证，又完全符合他的风格。在媒体露面时，他的主要论点是“ YouTube正在改变世界”；他还在撰写一本关于此的书的提案。他通过串联一些疯狂的特例来构建这个叙事：贾斯汀·比伯在母亲开始上传他唱歌的视频后被发现；非洲的一名男子通过YouTube视频自学标枪，后来赢得了奥运会奖牌。

玛丽恩让我主导撰写一份关于我们策略的“超级演示文稿”，并在组织内部推广（双关语，不幸的是，是故意的）。很难明确社交媒体的投资回报：尽管我们在Twitter上有五千万左右的粉丝，推文却几乎没有带来YouTube的流量；Instagram等平台几乎没有流量，而我们的互动很大一部分来自垃圾账号或机器人。但营销行话从我这里流畅自如。我写道，我们是品牌的声音，“推动爱与建立与社区的信任”，并“塑造围绕YouTube的日常对话”。当需要为我们的工作提出一个统一的使命宣言时，我借鉴了创意实验室和拉里·佩奇的崇高理念，我整个职业生涯都是为这一刻做准备：“我们提醒世界，人们为什么喜爱YouTube。”玛丽恩认为这很棒。

我随后就被提升了，并开始为最新的首席执行官撰写推文，这位CEO是谷歌老员工苏珊·沃西茨基。她的声音真诚且带有企业风格，是一位对YouTube创作者和新产品功能充满热情的妈妈。但YouTube卷入的争议日益增多。那是特朗普2016年当选前的一年，科技公司因在公众舆论极化中所扮演的角色而受到审查。YouTube在Gamergate中发挥了作用：https://www.newyorker.com/tech/annals-of-technology/gamergate-scandal-erupts-video-game-community，这是一场针对游戏界知名女性的在线骚扰运动，成为文化战争的焦点。（史蒂夫·班农后来将Gamergate描述为招募失意年轻人加入特朗普竞选的一种有效方式。）极右频道在平台上一直存在，但现在它们在不断壮大，变得主流，推动着可接受讨论界限的扩大。YouTube应该在多大程度上监管其内容？管理层似乎无法决定。

2016年夏天，我负责策划一场总统选举的大预算动员投票活动。没有人明说我们希望影响特朗普的选票，但众所周知，YouTube可以通过提高年轻人投票率来帮助民主党。我们将这场运动称为#VoteIRL，并邀请了大量平台上最有人气的明星，鼓励他们的观众注册投票。连奥巴马总统都拍摄了#VoteIRL视频，为这场活动增添了官方公民支持的氛围。当然，希拉里·克林顿输了，但在内部，我们的活动被认为是成功的。高层给了我一笔丰厚的奖金和内部奖项。布赖特巴特拿到了T.G.I.F.会议的泄露录像，会上拉里和谢尔盖公开表达了对特朗普胜选的震惊：“作为移民和难民，我当然觉得这次选举令人深感冒犯，我知道你们很多人也有同感，”谢尔盖说。谷歌员工们向高管们提出了焦虑的问题，比如YouTube等产品是否在强化扭曲的信念，使国家更加分裂。

社交媒体团队对品牌公众舆论的控制力向来脆弱。YouTube 太大、太不稳定、引力太强；无论我们如何管理舆论，它每天都能吸引数十亿的观众。我们的整个任务——塑造每日话题、提升品牌喜爱度、提醒世界为什么喜爱我们——现在几乎显得有些妄想。

消息一出，我就查看了在线讨论群，看看谷歌员工在说什么。我关注的一个匿名、活跃的妈妈群，通常充满了实际、 nerd 式的工程师，他们在分析孩子的饮食和睡眠模式，或者整理最新关于提升婴儿大脑的研究。但 Rubin 的事件挖掘出了新的内容。一位妈妈开了一个讨论帖来谈这些揭露，其他女性开始分享她们在大科技男权俱乐部中所见所经历的故事。有一个人讲述了一个带有悲喜交加色彩的故事，发生在国际妇女节的 T.G.I.F. 会议上，当时一位谷歌员工请 Larry 和 Sergey 列举一些他们个人的女性榜样。Larry 显然选择了当时站在台上的首席财务官 Ruth Porat；Sergey 一时想不出任何人，直到 Larry 帮他想到了 Gloria Steinem。

在下一次 T.G.I.F. 会议上，Larry 为“痛苦”的 Rubin 事件道歉，并含糊地说他事后会做出不同决定，但他拒绝直接谈及赔偿事宜。取代 Larry 的 CEO Sundar Pichai 说：“我们想变得更好”，人力资源主管 Eileen Naughton 说公司已经对政策进行了改进。随后会议转向了正常的产品更新。一位妈妈群里的成员写道：“T.G.I.F.反应太弱。”另一个人说：“还有谁感到*个人*受辱，为了让像他们这样的男人致富而在有限的时间里劳碌？”谷歌员工并不是这样说话的。过去我们被培养得乐观并信任领导。心怀感激。永远是参与者，从不做受害者。帖子里的另一位女性说她会给 Sundar 写封邮件。还有几个人跟着说她们也会写。

我从在通信部门的工作中就知道，这远远不够。个人的投诉太容易被消化，被引导进入官僚体系。因此，我回信写道：“我们正处在一个深刻的转折点上，#MeToo、对科技公司金钱/权力的反弹，以及一般的社会动荡相互碰撞……我在想我们如何利用我们的集体杠杆……如果我们团结起来，我们能做些什么？罢工、示威、给Sundar写公开信？”

那天晚上，群组中的一位成员在Memegen上发布了帖子，这是一个内部论坛，曾经有人在上面评论我的T.G.I.F.邮件：“怎么样组织一次罢工来反对有毒的职场文化？”大约一百人点了“+1”表示响应，而妈妈群里的女性们也在讨论这个想法。我迅速创建了一个新的Google群组来讨论这个想法。我们几乎立刻做出了第一个决定：罢工定在11月1日星期四——仅五天之后。一位名叫Tanuja的项目经理伸出援手，表示愿意帮忙。我们在我所在大楼的会议室见面；她组织得非常有条理，充满激情，准备全力负责项目管理。在四十五分钟内，我们勾勒出了一个大致的计划，并建立了一个内部网站：采用“中心与辐射”模式，每个参与办公室都有地方负责人，用自己的故事和风格来定制那一天的活动。

周一深夜，BuzzFeed爆料称谷歌女性员工计划罢工。公司本身给了我们另外一个巨大的公关助力，当晚Sundar发送了一封电子邮件：“你们中的一些人提出了非常建设性的想法，建议我们如何改进未来的政策和流程……我正在吸收你们所有的反馈，以便将这些想法转化为行动。”他说，人力资源部门会让经理了解我们计划的活动，并确保我们获得所需的支持。这是典型的公关柔道——利用异议语言来中和它。

我运用了在谷歌管理形象十多年里磨练出的每一项技能：起草公关稿件、与媒体协调、在幕后指导发言人。《纽约时报》报道了“谷歌正在努力控制日益增长的内部反弹”。《纽约》杂志刊登了一篇文章：https://www.thecut.com/2018/11/google-walkout-organizers-explain-demands.html，由我们核心团队联名：“我们是谷歌罢工的组织者。以下是我们的要求。”数百人在一个共享的 Google 文档中留下了评论和修改，我们将它们缩减到五点，包括承诺结束薪酬不平等和改进举报性行为不当的流程。

一到黎明，很明显这次罢工会非常盛大。当地时间上午11:10，在每个地方同时举行。在都柏林、伦敦、苏黎世、东京和汉堡，人们鱼贯而出，媒体随处可见。事件开始在推特上成为热搜。在 YouTube，我们总是试图制造这种时刻——通过大规模品牌推广、巨额预算和错综复杂的代理机构网络，努力让某件事成为趋势、突破并传播开来。但我们几乎从未成功。现在，它就在眼前，自然地发生了。

Marion 常驻湾区的 San Bruno 办公室，但假期期间她去伦敦看望家人。她在屏幕上出现，脸靠近电脑，背景全部模糊，她告诉我她在假期期间思考过，并决定重组团队。一名曾向我汇报的成员将成为我的同级，并接管“每日社交”，这是我之前的核心职责。Marion 还正在招聘一个新的上级，这意味着我将不再直接向她汇报。简而言之，我的工作在一夜之间被剥离。我尽快结束了通话，惊讶得无法回应。

第二天，我给马里恩写信，解释为什么应保留我的职位。她很快回复，说重组无论如何都会进行，于是我决定联系我们部门的人力资源负责人。她告诉我，她无能为力，因为市场部门最近改用了新的人人力资源模式，人力资源员工现在只服务于主管。如果层级较低的员工遇到问题，我们需要在内部网络上提交工单，然后会有集中式人力资源中心的人来处理。

我还是提交了工单，主要出于好奇，想看看这个自动系统会如何处理一个严重的申诉。在“请描述您的问题”框内（最多250个字符），我写道我组织了谷歌的罢工，而现在我的老板无缘无故要降我的职，这看起来像是典型的对劳动组织的报复。过了几天才有人回应，又过了一段时间，我才通过视频与一位年轻的人力资源代表见面。我告诉他我的情况，他按照一套通用解决办法逐步处理。如果我与经理有问题，可以考虑邀请她一起喝咖啡或参加活动——在办公室外的一些优质时间来重建关系。我可以利用公司的内部正念和自我关怀资源，或者休些带薪假放松，因为在谷歌工作可能非常有压力！

随着对罢工的报道持续，关于谷歌文化的更多故事也开始浮现。我向纽约办公室讲述我在创意实验室的经历，不久之后，谷歌首席营销官洛琳·图希尔——也就是我老板的老板的老板的老板——联系了我。她表示可以帮我联系一位名叫苏珊的高级人力资源代表，而苏珊又将我转介给福利团队的朱莉。到那时，我正在考虑休假，以便思考下一步——也许是调到市场部门的另一个团队，或者谷歌母公司Alphabet的另一个机构——但当朱莉点击幻灯片解释病假时，我感到很吃惊。为什么我要被当作一个生病的人看待？我在与苏珊的会议上哭过，解释我因报复感到多么受打击，但公司的叙述似乎是我正在经历精神崩溃。

第二天，当苏珊娜跟进问我是否考虑了她建议的选项时，我告诉她我正在寻求外部法律顾问的帮助。我已经联系了一位劳动律师，我们开始起草一封索赔信。在我们发送之前，玛丽恩的老板打电话给我，说我最终可以保留我的职责。在纸面上，我的工作被恢复了。我仍然负责社交媒体账户、小团队和每日会议。但玛丽恩几乎不和我说话。我被当作团队里的外来者对待。每当有人让我参与事务时，都是其他人而不是玛丽恩。有时，我感觉自己像是在被恶意戏弄。国际妇女节时，一位同事让我“放大”一个庆祝女性“坚韧与韧性”的活动。我指示我们的机构在推文中加入很多爱心表情。

罢工的另一位组织者梅雷迪斯，她的角色也被削弱了。四月，我们与其他组织者在视频聊天中召开会议，决定是时候发起一次新的劳动行动，这次集中在报复上。对我来说，这不是一个决定，而是对我在谷歌职业生涯结束的一个认知。梅雷迪斯和我向整个罢工名单发了一封信，描述了我们的经历。到下午，《纽约时报》已经发布了突发新闻标题：https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/22/technology/google-walkout-employees-retaliation.html：“谷歌员工称组织罢工后遭遇报复。”

谷歌的律师和我的律师开始进行离职谈判。在我离职的那一周的T.G.I.F.会议上，在问答环节中，最热门的问题是关于我的离开：“克莱尔·斯塔普尔顿，谷歌文化中的传奇人物，因为报复和不公待遇而离开。员工几乎不信任人力资源难道不算是个问题吗？”人力资源主管艾琳给出了公司的说辞，即公司已经调查了我的担忧，没有发现报复行为。她说，这是我决定离开的，公司尊重我的决定。公司也否认对梅雷迪斯进行报复。十年前，我可能会起草他们整洁的说辞版本。现在，我自己杂乱、不便的故事却已被吸收和中和。第二天，在一名人力资源代表的陪同下，我交回工牌、笔记本电脑和手机，最后一次走出办公室。

最近，创意实验室似乎有了一个新的任务，那就是让谷歌在人工智能方面的强势推进看起来尽可能友好。公司为了宣传其人工智能能力发布的广告充满甜味和超现实：树懒和浣熊在滑板上做踢翻动作；手机变成香草冰淇淋，配上听起来像韦斯·安德森电影里的俏皮音乐。更广泛的目标很简单：如果公司的人工智能显得极其异想天开、没有威胁性并且情感上聪明——“谷歌化”，你就会让它更深入地进入你的生活。我必须指出，在改名为 Gemini 之前，谷歌的人工智能聊天机器人叫 Bard。♦

摘自《别作恶：糟糕的上司、虚假的承诺与我逃离大科技公司》https://www.amazon.com/Dont-Be-Evil-Bosses-Promises/dp/0063465140。

一位经验丰富的登山者是否在山顶留下女友致死：/magazine/2026/07/06/did-a-climber-leave-his-girlfriend-to-die-at-the-top-of-a-mountain?

《飘》如何塑造了美国关于奴隶制和南方女性的神话：/magazine/1992/08/31/a-study-in-scarlett。

一位哈佛博士的科学家致命枪杀了她的三位同事。随后，她的家庭历史的揭露浮出水面：/magazine/2013/02/11/a-loaded-gun。

亿万富翁女性俱乐部：/magazine/2026/07/06/the-billionaires-vagina-club。

为什么有些人只睡四小时仍能茁壮成长：/culture/annals-of-inquiry/why-some-people-thrive-on-four-hours-of-sleep。

想要更好的搜索结果？在谷歌中将《纽约客》设为首选来源：https://www.google.com/preferences/source?q=newyorker.com。

I started working at Google in the summer of 2007, straight out of college, as a “new-­grad associate” in the communications department. My first week, I sat with more than a hundred other “Nooglers” (new Googlers) at the company’s weekly staff meeting, T.G.I.F., wearing matching company-issued propeller caps as a kind of ritual hazing. The venue was Charlie’s Cafe, a multilevel auditorium in the heart of the “Googleplex,” the company’s sprawling campus in Mountain View, California. The event felt less like a corporate meeting than like a weekly revival—part stand­up set, part science fair, part sermon, all of it fuelled by keg beer.

Despite the lore, Google’s offices didn’t make a big first impression. The bulk of the campus had been quickly converted after its previous occupant went down in the fallout from the dot-­com bust. The result was a complex of squat, one-­ or two-level buildings with metal and glass siding, surrounded by a moat of parking spaces, with Google signs plunked into the dirt out front. But there were plenty of amenities to point out—­the massage rooms and nap pods, the dinosaur fossil, the wacky sensory-­break touches like ball pits, swings, and yoga balls (even if no one actually seemed to use them). Foreign journalists seemed more skeptical than their American counterparts of perks such as lunch-­break haircuts or on-site laundry rooms, which I’d heard described as letting Google be your “housewife.”

“Z is is all a big plot to control ze workers, no?” a French reporter said.

At that point, though, I was still learning to see Google through Google’s eyes. I learned to deflect these kinds of questions and pitied the askers, a little bit, for their cynicism.

Over the following years, Google began broadcasting T.G.I.F. meetings to far-flung buildings across the Mountain View campus, and to an ever-growing constellation of satellite offices across the U.S. and around the world. Each week, we prepared a “prebrief” for Larry, Sergey, and the rest of the executive team, listing hot topics at the company that might come up during the Q. & A., and suggested talking points. I’d trawl internal e-mail lists to see what issues were getting Googlers riled up that week—Maps redesigns, Gmail-spam hiccups, price-hikes at the company’s on-site day care, management’s attempt to engineer healthy eating by moving the M&M jars. If an issue was really controversial, it might spawn a “centrithread,” with at least a hundred replies. My work became not just watching the Zeitgeist within the company but learning how to contain it—­reading through messages, distilling the emotional temperature, and crafting executive responses meant to absorb shock and restore calm.

This voice-of-Google thing—­a code I’d cracked for generating corpspeak with personality—­slowly became a hot commodity. The company relied heavily on the rhetoric of “culture” to keep tens of thousands of workers energized, giving a hundred and ten per cent. If work was going to be like a family, then it had to sound like one—maximally friendly, quirky, virtuous, Googley . So, in early 2011, when Larry Page became the C.E.O., replacing the veteran tech executive Eric Schmidt, I was looped in to help craft Larry’s internal messaging.

There were signs that Google was becoming bloated and inefficient, with multiple teams, for example, working on smartwatches simultaneously, as Googlers pointed out at one T.G.I.F. (In the end, none of these attempts could best the Apple Watch.) Larry said, blithely, that chasing the competition was a death knell, and yet that seemed to be all that we were doing. “We need to put more wood behind fewer arrows,” he often said, regurgitating an old Valley maxim. The trouble was, the arrows kept multiplying—appearing from nowhere, whizzing in every direction—and even Larry couldn’t seem to contain them.

Google+ was a short-lived flop, but the spin was relentless. The platform had hit ten million users just two weeks after an invitation-­only launch, Larry boasted. By the fall, the number was forty million, and by early 2012 more than twice that. What Larry didn’t say was that many of those “users” had been been virtually forced to create accounts when they signed up for other Google services. The engagement numbers were dismal. When the platform was sunsetted, in 2018, Google admitted that the average Google+ user spent less than five seconds on the platform per visit. The place was a graveyard of auto-­populated profiles, a digital Potemkin village.

In the crusade to make everything social, Google ended up destroying one of the few genuinely social things it had ever made: the RSS-feed aggregator Google Reader. Reader wasn’t glamorous, but it had a passionate following. It was small, by Google standards (and only by Google standards), with a reported thirty million or so users, many of whom were active daily. It was, by far, my favorite Google product, the one place I actually “socialized” online; I used it every day to read stuff on the web, share links, commiserate with friends. I saw a Googler on Hacker News say that the killing of Reader was the “Elves leave Middle-Earth” moment. Memegen was flooded with snark: We can bankroll a delusional moon shot to beam internet from balloons (Project Loon), but we can’t keep a few engineers on this?

My own growing skepticism started to bleed into my T.G.I.F. e-mails. The messages started coming out half liturgy, half parody, depending on how you looked at it:

If an alien walked into an art museum, wouldn’t it think the abstract paintings were done first, thousands of years before the Renaissance? . . . step right up for a Lacanian mirror-­phase-y TGIF, where everyone comes together to blink furiously at the reflection and chant: “This is what Google looks like.”

There were other ways that the company’s power structures, and my own precarious place within them, began to come into focus. In the summer of 2012, I transferred to work at Creative Lab, a coveted New York-based studio that produced some of Google’s major ads. My boss there, Kevin, dressed like a little kid—­T-shirt, cargo shorts, low-­top sneakers— ­ and had a boyish crew cut to match. The only tipoffs that he was pushing forty were a sallow, hangdog facial expression and Nosferatu-­esque under-eye bags. He used the word “shit” a lot: We just make shit. We do epic shit. During our first and only meeting before I was hired, he barely discussed me, my work, or how he envisioned that I might fit into the Lab, though he did say, with a perceptible note of admiration, “You clearly get the Googley shit.” I was an emissary from, or maybe a totem of, Mountain View, and that gave me some currency. But once I was in the job he didn’t bother to train me. “Just read up on the Lab and watch all the videos again,” he said. He’d find something for me to do eventually.

A cocky freelancer, a buddy of Kevin’s from another agency, started soon after I did and was immediately handed important projects. He effortlessly cracked Kevin’s shell, bringing out a goofy, relaxed side of him I’d never once seen. The two laughed and joked constantly, and lip-­synched to the song of the year, Carly Rae Jepsen：https://www.newyorker.com/culture/cultural-comment/carly-rae-jepsen-and-the-rise-of-the-mindie-artist’s “Call Me Maybe,” as an afternoon energy boost. I remember running into him, a month into the job, in the snack kitchen, and him remarking, “Oh, I forgot you existed,” before shuffling off to his next meeting. When I asked a co-worker for advice about how to persuade Kevin to “put me in the game,” he shrugged and said that Kevin was a “guy’s guy,” who liked working with the kind of dude he could get a beer with after work.

The bulk of the creatives at the Lab were men. There were plenty of women, but they were mostly slotted into supporting roles—­managing budgets, spreadsheets, and schedules, making the machine run. A female exec, the head of production, left soon after I arrived, and there wasn’t a single female creative director the entire time I was there. A top executive was asked about this once in an all-­hands meeting. He offered some vague lip service about how the Lab was such a ­unicorn-­magic kind of place that they needed to be “extra sure” that anyone they hired—­read: any woman—­would be set up to succeed. This was framed as sage judgment, and we dutifully nodded along. Who could argue with the logic of meritocracy? I was close to quitting when I saw an e-mail from a Google internal recruiter: YouTube：https://www.newyorker.com/books/under-review/the-overlooked-titan-of-social-media, now owned by Google, was having trouble filling a position on the marketing team, and they thought I’d be a great fit.

My title at YouTube was “curation strategy manager,” but YouTube was not a curated place. It was wild, endless, untamable. In earlier eras, the site had more “home page editorial,” dedicated sections in which editors chose interesting things to spotlight. But YouTube had long since learned that algorithms could do a better job picking videos to squeeze the longest “total watch time” out of every user. As best as I could understand it, we curator-managers were there to add a human component to the algorithm, helping to shape it with our insights about what made for good content. Our team had a shared project with Engineering, basically an infinite computer-­generated playlist. The machine trawled the site, surfacing the most popular content and filtering out anything risqué, and then we topped up the offerings with whatever might have been missed. My boss, another Kevin, directed me away from YouTube, to Twitter, Reddit, and Digg, to see which YouTube videos were popping up that day. The exercise was largely fruitless: it was genuinely hard to find things that the machine hadn’t caught.

Kevin had given a TED Talk called “Why Videos Go Viral” that garnered a lot of attention from YouTube management, and he was settling into a regular gig as a company spokesman. He was a deft summarizer of internet memes and phenomena: “Gangnam Style：https://www.newyorker.com/culture/cultural-comment/the-door-opened-by-gangnam-style,” Keyboard Cat, “Charlie bit my finger”—YouTube’s oldest, least controversial hits. He was dimpled and telegenic, with a confident, know-­it-­all way of talking about internet trends. He said that he’d invented the genre of the political supercut video, a claim both difficult to verify and completely on-­brand. In media appearances, his main talking point was “YouTube is changing the world”; he was writing a book proposal about it. He built this narrative by stringing together crazy outlier examples: Justin Bieber getting discovered after his mom started uploading videos of him singing; a guy in Africa who taught himself the javelin from YouTube videos, and later won an Olympic medal.

Marion asked me to take the lead on writing a “megadeck” about our strategy and socializing it (pun, unfortunately, intended) within the org. It was hard to pinpoint a tangible return-on-investment in social media: ­despite our fifty or so million followers on Twitter, tweets drove negligible traffic back to YouTube; platforms like Instagram drove no traffic at all, and much of our engagement was from spammers or bots. But the marketing jargon flowed from me with ease. We were the voice of the brand, I wrote, “driving love and building trust with our community” and “shaping the daily conversation around YouTube.” When it was time to come up with a single mission statement for our work, I channelled the loftiness of Creative Lab and Larry Page, my whole career building up to this moment: “We remind the world what it loves about YouTube.” Marion thought it was brilliant.

I was promoted right afterward, and I started to ghostwrite the tweets of the latest C.E.O., a longtime Googler named Susan Wojcicki. Her voice was earnest and corporate, a mom enthusiastic about YouTube creators and new product features. But the controversies in which YouTube was implicated were multiplying. It was the year leading up to Trump’s 2016 election, and tech companies were being scrutinized for their part in polarizing public discourse. YouTube had played a role in Gamergate：https://www.newyorker.com/tech/annals-of-technology/gamergate-scandal-erupts-video-game-community, an online harassment campaign against prominent women in the gaming world that became a culture-wars flashpoint. (Steve Bannon later described Gamergate as a useful way to recruit disaffected young men into Trump’s campaign.) Hard-­right channels had always existed on the platform, but now they were growing bigger, becoming mainstream, pushing the boundaries of what kinds of talk were acceptable. How much was YouTube supposed to police its content? Management didn’t seem to be able to decide.

In the summer of 2016, I was put in charge of coming up with a big-­budget get-out-the-vote campaign for the Presidential election. No one said outright that we hoped to tip the scales against Trump, but it was understood that YouTube could help the Democrats by boosting youth turnout. We called the campaign #VoteIRL, and we tapped tons of the platform’s biggest stars to encourage their audiences to register to vote. Even President Obama made a #VoteIRL video, lending the campaign an aura of official civic endorsement. Hillary Clinton lost, of course, but internally our campaign was deemed a success. The higher-ups gave me a big bonus and an internal award. Breitbart got hold of leaked footage from a T.G.I.F. meeting during which Larry and Sergey openly expressed their dismay over Trump’s victory: “Myself as an immigrant and a refugee, I certainly find this election deeply offensive, and I know many of you do, too,” Sergey said. Googlers peppered the executives with anxious questions about whether products like YouTube were reinforcing warped beliefs and making the country more divided.

The social-media team’s supposed grip on the public narrative about the brand had always been tenuous. YouTube was too big, too volatile, too gravitational; it pulled in billions of eyeballs a day, no matter how we managed the optics. Our whole mandate—­shape the daily conversation, boost brand love, remind the world why it loves us—­now felt almost delusional.

As soon as the story broke, I checked the online discussion groups to see what Google staffers were saying. An anonymous, super-active mom group that I followed was usually full of practical, nerdy engineers crunching data on their kids’ eating and sleeping patterns, or synthesizing the latest studies about boosting baby brains. But the Rubin story unearthed something new. A mom started a thread to discuss the revelations, and women began sharing stories about what they’d witnessed or endured working in the boys’ club of Big Tech. One recounted a tragicomic anecdote from a T.G.I.F. meeting on International Women’s Day, when a Googler had asked Larry and Sergey to name some of their personal female heroes. Larry apparently chose Ruth Porat, the C.F.O., who was with him onstage; Sergey struggled to come up with anyone until Larry helped him land on Gloria Steinem.

At the next T.G.I.F., Larry apologized for the “painful” Rubin story and spoke vaguely about how he would have made different decisions in hindsight, but he refused to address the payout directly. Sundar Pichai, who’d succeeded Larry as C.E.O., said “we want to get better,” and the head of H.R., Eileen Naughton, said that the company had made improvements to its policies. Then the meeting moved on to address normal product updates. “Weak ass TGIF response,” someone in the mom group wrote. Someone else said: “Anyone else feeling *personally* humiliated to be spending their limited hours on this planet to enrich men like this?” This wasn’t how Googlers talked. We’d been conditioned to be optimistic and trusting of leadership. Grateful. Always players, never victims. Another woman in the thread said she was going to write an e-mail to Sundar. Several more chimed in that they would, too.

I knew, from my time in the communications department, that this wasn’t enough. Individual complaints were too easy to metabolize, to redirect into the bureaucracy. So I wrote back: “We’re at a deep pivot moment where MeToo, the backlash against tech’s money/power, and just general societal unrest collide. . . . I wonder how we can use our collective leverage. . . . If we banded together, what could we do? A walkout, a strike, an open letter to Sundar?”

That night, a member of the group posted on Memegen, the internal forum where commentary on my T.G.I.F. e-mails had once appeared: How about a walkout to stand against toxic workplace culture? Maybe a hundred people reacted with a “+1,” and women in the mom group were talking about it. I quickly created a new Google group to discuss the idea. We made our first decision almost immediately: the walkout would be Thursday, November 1st—just five days away. A project manager named Tanuja reached out and offered to help. We met in a conference room in my building; she was hyper-organized, fired up, ready to project-­manage the hell out of this. In forty-­five minutes, we outlined a rough plan and built an internal site: a “hub and spoke” model, with local leads in every participating office, customizing the day with their own stories and flair.

Late on Monday, BuzzFeed broke the news that women at Google were planning a walkout. We got another big P.R. boost from the company itself, when Sundar sent an e-mail that night. “Some of you have raised very constructive ideas for how we can improve our policies and our processes going forward . . . I’m taking in all of your feedback so we can turn these ideas into action.” H.R. would make managers aware of the event we’d planned, he said, and insure that we had the support we needed. It was classic P.R. jujitsu—­absorbing the language of dissent to neutralize it.

I used every skill I’d honed over a decade of managing Google’s optics: drafting comms, coördinating with press, coaching speakers behind the scenes. The Times described how “Google was struggling to contain a growing internal backlash.” New York ran a piece：https://www.thecut.com/2018/11/google-walkout-organizers-explain-demands.html co-signed by our core team: “We’re the Organizers of the Google Walkout. Here Are Our Demands.” Hundreds of people had left comments and edits in a shared Google Doc, and we’d whittled them down to five points, including a commitment to end pay inequity and an improved process for reporting sexual misconduct.

By sunrise, it was clear that the walkout was going to be huge. It took place at 11:10 A.M. local time in every location. In Dublin, London, Zurich, Tokyo, and Hamburg, people streamed from the offices, and the press was everywhere. The event started trending on Twitter. At YouTube, we were always trying to manufacture moments like this—with sprawling brand campaigns, enormous budgets, and a labyrinth of agencies all straining to make something trend, break through, go viral. We almost never pulled it off. And now here it was, unfolding organically.

Marion was based in the Bay Area, in the San Bruno offices, but she’d been in London visiting family for the holidays. Appearing onscreen, her face close to the computer, and the background all fuzzy, she told me that she’d had a think over the break, and that she’d decided to reorganize the team. A member who had reported to me would now become my peer and take over “daily social,” the stream of content that had been my core responsibility. Marion was also hiring a new lead above me, meaning that I would no longer report directly to her. In short, my job was being gutted overnight. I ended the call as quickly as I could, too stunned to respond.

The next day, I wrote to Marion making the case for keeping my role as it was. She replied quickly, stating that the reorganization would go ahead regardless, so I decided to reach out to our department’s H.R. person. She told me that she couldn’t help, because the marketing department had recently switched to a new human-resources model, and H.R. staff members like her now served only directors. If employees lower down in the hierarchy had an issue, we’d have to file a ticket on an internal network, and someone would be assigned from a centralized H.R. hub to manage it.

I went ahead and filed a ticket, mostly out of curiosity about how this automated system would process a serious claim. In a “Please describe your issue” box (two hundred and fifty characters allotted), I wrote that I’d organized the Google walkout and now my boss was demoting me out of nowhere, which seemed like textbook retaliation for labor organizing. It took a couple of days for anyone to respond, and a few more before I met, over video, with a young H.R. representative. I told him my story, and he worked methodically through a script of generic solutions. If I was having challenges with my manager, I should consider inviting her out for coffee or an activity—some quality time outside the office to rebuild the relationship. I could take advantage of the company’s internal mindfulness and self-care resources, or take some P.T.O. to relax, because working at Google could be pretty demanding!

As coverage of the walkout continued, more stories about Google’s culture began to surface. I spoke to New York about my experience at Creative Lab, and, not long afterward, Lorraine Twohill, Google’s chief marketing officer—my boss’s boss’s boss’s boss—reached out. She offered to connect me with a senior H.R. rep named Suzanne, who, in turn, referred me to someone named Julie on the benefits team. By that point I was considering taking time off, to figure out a next step—a transfer to a different team in marketing, perhaps, or to a different org within Alphabet—but I was surprised when Julie clicked through slides explaining medical leave. Why was I being treated as a sick person? I had cried in the meeting with Suzanne, explaining how crushed I’d felt by the retaliation, but the company’s narrative seemed to be that I was having a mental breakdown.

The next day, when Suzanne followed up to ask whether I’d considered the options she’d suggested, I told her that I was seeking outside counsel. I’d been in touch with a labor lawyer, and we began drafting a demand letter. Before we could send it, Marion’s boss called me and said that I could keep my responsibilities after all. On paper, my job was restored. I still ran the social-media accounts, my little team, a daily meeting. But Marion barely spoke to me. I was treated like an interloper on the team. Whenever I was looped into things, it was by someone other than Marion. Sometimes, it felt like I was being trolled. For International Women’s Day, a peer asked me to “amplify” a campaign celebrating the “strength and resilience” of women. I directed our agency to add lots of heart emojis to our tweets.

Another organizer of the walkout, Meredith, had also had her role diminished. In April, we convened with other organizers on a video chat and decided it was time for a new labor action, this time focussed on retaliation. For me, this wasn’t so much a decision as a recognition that my career at Google was over. Meredith and I sent a letter to the entire walkout list, describing what we’d experienced. By afternoon, the Times had published a breaking headline：https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/22/technology/google-walkout-employees-retaliation.html: “Google Employees Say They Faced Retaliation After Organizing Walkout.”

Google’s lawyer and mine began exit negotiations. At T.G.I.F. the week that I left, during the Q. & A., a top question was about my departure: “Claire Stapleton, a legend in Google culture, is leaving because of retaliation and mistreatment. Is the fact that employees barely trust H.R. not considered an issue?” Eileen, the head of H.R., delivered the corporate line, which was that the company had investigated my concerns and found no retaliation. It was my decision to leave, she said, and they respected that decision. The company had also denied retaliating against Meredith. A decade earlier, I might have drafted some version of their tidy talking points. Now my own messy, inconvenient story had been absorbed and neutralized. The next day, escorted by an H.R. representative, I turned in my badge, laptop, and phone, and walked out of the office for the last time.

Lately, the Creative Lab seems to have a new assignment, to make Google’s aggressive push into artificial intelligence look as friendly as possible. The ads that the company has been putting out to promote its A.I. capabilities are sugary and surreal: sloths and raccoons doing kick flips on skateboards; phones turning into vanilla ice-cream cones, set to twee music that sounds like it belongs in a Wes Anderson movie. The broader goal is simple: if the company’s A.I. feels maximally whimsical, nonthreatening, and emotionally intelligent— Googley —you’ll let it deeper into your life. I’d be remiss not to note that, before it was rebranded as Gemini, Google’s A.I. chatbot was called Bard. ♦

This was drawn from “Don’t Be Evil: Bad Bosses, Fake Promises, and My Escape from Big Tech：https://www.amazon.com/Dont-Be-Evil-Bosses-Promises/dp/0063465140.”

Did an experienced alpinist leave his girlfriend to die at the top of a mountain：/magazine/2026/07/06/did-a-climber-leave-his-girlfriend-to-die-at-the-top-of-a-mountain?

How “Gone with the Wind” shaped American myths about slavery and Southern women：/magazine/1992/08/31/a-study-in-scarlett.

A scientist with a Ph.D. from Harvard fatally shot three of her colleagues. Then revelations about her family history came to light：/magazine/2013/02/11/a-loaded-gun.

The billionaires’ vagina club：/magazine/2026/07/06/the-billionaires-vagina-club.

Why some people thrive on four hours of sleep：/culture/annals-of-inquiry/why-some-people-thrive-on-four-hours-of-sleep.

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