A Google Civil War? With Bloomberg's Mark Bergen

December 6, 2019·31 min·2 clips

How a search on Google's intranet MoMA for GCP plus CBP got Rebecca Rivers and three colleagues fired.

Google was already on the docket. Brian McCullough starts with the week's Google news, treating the leadership change as surprising but not exactly out of nowhere. Then comes the useful question: why now, after Larry had already stepped back from day-to-day management under Alphabet? Bergen begins with history. Alphabet seemed strange at first, then started to look like a name for responsibilities that had already moved around. That becomes the pattern for the conversation. It shifts from leadership change to McCullough's sharper phrase: civil war inside Google. Bergen dials that back a little. Maybe not a war, but definitely skirmishing, and maybe guerrilla warfare. McCullough wants to sort the conflicts. Me Too concerns, James Damore, labor-style organizing, Pentagon and AI objections, and political bias fights all show up as different fronts in the same company-wide argument. Bergen points to chronology. He credits Natasha Tiku's reporting and treats the Damore memo in 2017, along with the Trump election, as ground zero. The memo exposed a faction. For some employees, the shock was realizing people inside Google held views they did not expect to find there. That kicked up internal resistance. Bergen describes employee energy moving through internal chats, encrypted messaging, and networks that were already there. Management is more nervous now, especially after employees took Google Search bias claims to Project Veritas. That is the bind. A company known for openness, argument, and being Google-y is starting to act more like a conventional corporation. Oracle is the comparison point. Nobody expects the same uproar there, Bergen says, because Oracle never made room for that kind of internal conversation.

As heard by us

A sharp look at Google's culture fights and the company becoming more conventional under pressure.

Techmeme Ride Home frames Google's leadership change and internal dissent as two parts of the same question: how much of the old Google culture can survive once management starts acting more like a normal corporate hierarchy.

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Why you'd press play

Why Google's changing of the guard feels bigger than a routine management move.

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