don't be evil

In the Plex: How Google Thinks, Works, and Shapes Our Lives
by Steven Levy
Published 12 Apr 2011

You might be in a microkitchen eyeing someone else’s leftovers in the fridge and then see the little note saying “Don’t be evil.” And, says David Krane, “You realize, it can mean, ‘Don’t take someone’s food that looks appealing.’” But it also applied to much bigger things, like maintaining a stiff line between advertising and search results, or protecting a user’s personal information, or—much later—resisting the oppressive measures of the Chinese government. For months, “Don’t be evil” was like a secret handshake among Googlers. An idea would come up in a meeting with a whiff of anticompetitiveness to it, and someone would remark that it sounded … evil. End of idea. “Don’t be evil” was a shortcut to remind everyone that Google was better than other companies.

…

“That whole thing rubbed me the wrong way,” Buchheit later recalled. “So I suggested something that would make people feel uncomfortable but also be interesting. It popped into my mind that ‘Don’t be evil’ would be a catchy and interesting statement. And people laughed. But I said, ‘No, really.’” The slogan made Stacy Sullivan uncomfortable. It was so negative. “Can’t we phrase it as ‘Do the right thing’ or something more positive?” she asked. Marissa and Salar agreed with her. But the geeks—Buchheit and Patel—wouldn’t budge. “Don’t be evil” pretty much said it all, as far as they were concerned. They fought off every attempt to drop it from the list. “They liked it the way it was,” Sullivan would later say with a sigh.

…

But then Eric Schmidt revealed Google’s internal motto to a reporter from Wired. To McCaffrey, that was the moment when “Don’t be evil” got out of control and became a hammer to clobber Google’s every move. “We lost it, and I could never grasp it back,” she says. “Everybody would’ve been happy if it could’ve been this sort of silent code or little undercurrent that we secretly harbored instead of this thing that set us up for a lot of ridiculous criticism.” Elliot Schrage, who was in charge of communications and policy for Google from 2005 to 2008, concluded that “Don’t be evil” might originally have benefited the company but became “a millstone around my neck” as Google’s growth took it to controversial regions of the world.

The Googlization of Everything:
by Siva Vaidhyanathan
Published 1 Jan 2010

Miguel Helft and David Barboza, “Google’s Plan to Turn Its Back on China Has Risks,” New York Times, March 23, 2010; John Markoff, “Cyberattack on Google Said to Hit Password System,” New York Times, April 19, 2010; John Markoff and Ashlee Vance, “Software Firms Fear Hackers Who Leave No Trace,” New York Times, January 20, 2010. 8. Harry Lewis, “Does Google Violate Its ‘Don’t Be Evil’ Motto?” Intelligence Squared, National Public Radio, November 26, 2008, www.npr.org. 9. Esther Dyson, “Does Google Violate Its ‘Don’t Be Evil’ Motto?” 10. Andrew Shapiro, The Control Revolution: How the Internet Is Putting Individuals in Charge and Changing the World We Know (New York: PublicAffairs, 1999), 6–7. Also see Gladys Ganley, Unglued Empire: The Soviet Experience with Communications Technologies (Norwood, NJ: Ablex, 1996). 11.

…

Perhaps our role is not to doubt, but to believe. Perhaps we should just surf along in awe of the system that gives us such beautiful sunrises—or at least easily finds us digital images of sunrises with just a few keystrokes. Like all such narratives, it underwrites a kind of faith—faith in the goodwill of an enterprise whose motto is “Don’t be evil,” whose mission is “to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful,” and whose ambition is to create the perfect search engine. On the basis of that faith—born of users’ experiences with the services that Google provides—since the search engine first appeared and spread through word of mouth for a dozen years, Google has permeated our culture.

…

Do technologies spark revolutions, or do concepts like revolution raise expectations and levels of effects of technologies? The chapters that follow attempt to answer such questions. The first two chapters explore the moral universe of Google and its users. I don’t really care if Google commits good or evil. In fact, as I explain below, the slogan “Don’t be evil” distracts us from carefully examining the effects of Google’s presence and activity in our lives. The first chapter argues that we must consider the extent to which Google regulates the Web, and thus the extent to which we have relinquished that duty to one company. The company itself takes a technocratic approach to any larger ethical and social questions in its way.

Risk: A User's Guide
by Stanley McChrystal and Anna Butrico
Published 4 Oct 2021

Though some of his teammates were initially hesitant, they ultimately capitulated, and “Don’t be evil” became one of Google’s core values. The phrase took this fledgling start-up to new moral heights beyond the advertising space, inspiring Google to try to use its services for the common good. “Don’t be evil” was easy to remember, comforting in tone, and noble in purpose. When the company aimed to go public in 2004, Google’s IPO registration incorporated the phrase—serving as a central message about the kind of company Google was, where it would sit in the market, and more important, what it would do for the world. The company wrote, “Don’t be evil. We believe strongly that in the long term, we will be better served—as shareholders and in all other ways—by a company that does good things for the world even if we forgo some short term gains.”

…

Misunderstood or conflicting narratives can undermine confidence and committment. Brand Damage. Untrue or ineffective brand narratives can destroy the credibility of our products and businesses. Don’t Be Evil Paul Buchheit, Google’s twenty-third employee, had a sense of humor. He was sitting in a meeting in early 2000 to discuss and choose the company’s values, and he recommended a simple three-word phrase: “Don’t be evil.” Buchheit applauded Google for turning away from the malevolent temptations of some advertising agencies. These companies would pay search engines, like Google, a pretty penny to stealthily sneak ads into users’ searches, but Google resisted.

…

Eventually, the investigative news site The Intercept exposed Google’s dealings in another serious blow to its “Don’t be evil” narrative. To complicate matters even further, the project was also scrutinized by Congress. What could Google have done differently? First, it’s important to understand that evil is in the eye of the beholder. I, for one, would not consider a partnership with the Department of Defense evil—but that’s bringing my own biases to the table. With biases and perspectives like these in mind, Google should have defined the scope of its “Don’t be evil” narrative from the beginning—to apply to advertising, to company culture, and more broadly to contracts with third parties.

Googled: The End of the World as We Know It
by Ken Auletta
Published 1 Jan 2009

He vowed, “We’ll never sell anyone’s health records.” And in a March 2008 speech, Eric Schmidt promised to keep the site free of all advertising. There is a shared, and perhaps blinding, belief on the Google campus that Google was altruistic, an attitude reflected in “Don’t be evil.” On a stage he shared with Page at the Global Philanthropy Forum after Google embraced the slogan, Brin declared that ‘“don’t be evil’ serves as a reminder to our employees,” but it “was a mistake. It should really say, ’Be Good.‘” One can interpret Brin’s remarks as a reflection of his idealism, or his naïveté—or both. To simply say a corporation should be good ignores the range of choices a company is compelled to make in conducting its business.

…

Google is seeking to make almost every book ever published available in digitized form. Schools in impoverished nations that are without textbooks can now retrieve knowledge for free. “The Internet,” said Google’s chief economist, Hal Varian, “makes information available. Google makes information accessible.” Google’s uncorporate slogan—“Don’t be evil”—appeals to Americans who embrace underdogs like Apple that stand up to giants like Microsoft. Google’s is one of the world’s most trusted corporate brands. Among traditional media companies—from newspapers and magazines to book publishers, television, Hollywood studios, advertising agencies, telephone companies, and Microsoft—no company inspires more awe, or more fear.

…

That Google might achieve this goal in less than a generation, in a time when copyright and privacy practices are being upended, when newspapers are declaring bankruptcy and in-depth journalism is endangered, when the profit margins of book publishers are squeezed along with their commitment to serious authors, when broadcast television networks dilute their programming with less expensive reality shows and unscripted fare, when cable news networks talk more than they listen, when the definitions of community and privacy are being redefined, and the way citizens read and process information is being altered, and when most traditional media models are being reconfigured by digital companies like Google—all this means that it’s important to put Google under the microscope. Brilliant engineers are at the core of the success of a company like Google. Drill down, as this book attempts to, and you’ll see that engineering is a potent tool to deliver worthwhile efficiencies, and disruption as well. Google takes seriously its motto, “Don’t be evil.” But because we’re dealing with humans not algorithms, intent sometimes matters less than effect. A company that questions everything and believes in acting without asking for permission has succeeded like few companies before. Unlike most technologies that disrupted existing business—the printed book that replaced scrolls, the telephone that replaced the telegraph, the automobile that replaced the horse and buggy, the airplane that supplanted cruise ships, the computer that supplanted typewriters—Google search produces not a tangible product but something abstract: knowledge.

I'm Feeling Lucky: The Confessions of Google Employee Number 59
by Douglas Edwards
Published 11 Jul 2011

It was bad coding hygiene to build an itemized list if you could apply a general rule. "Aren't all of these covered by, 'Don't be evil'?" Paul asked. No one took him seriously. The meeting concluded with a list of eleven core values, which HR asked me to help wordsmith. "Don't be evil" wasn't one of them. The meeting left Amit unsatisfied, and he took it upon himself to proselytize the Word of Paul. Soon, "Don't be evil" began blemishing every markable surface like brown spots on ripening bananas. I had a rolling whiteboard in my cubicle, and one day when I came back from lunch, "Don't be evil" was neatly printed in one of its corners. I saw the phrase scrawled on conference room walls and twirling across laptop screensavers.

…

This book won't delve deeply into Google's current imbroglios over censorship, regulation, and monopoly. I include only what happened between my first day in 1999 and the day I left in 2005. We weren't yet worried about network neutrality, street-view data gathering, or offshore wind farms. Our big issues barely grazed the electrified moral fence of our "Don't be evil" credo: develop the best search technology, sell lots of ads, avoid getting killed by Microsoft. While this story is told from a marketer's perspective and my title came to encompass "consumer brand management," this book is not just about marketing. I don't claim to have "built" Google's brand.

…

"I feel as though we've sold out with this RealNames thing," engineer Paul Bucheit complained to a large group of Googlers including Larry and Sergey. "RealNames is a real source of junk and I think it is only going to get worse." Paul cared deeply about engineering quality and about ethics and especially about the intersection of the two. He summed up his attitude some time later with the phrase "Don't be evil." It caught on. "This is even worse than auctioning off results," Paul complained. "Just for fun, I registered the RealNames keyword 'Craig Barrett.' Now when you search for 'Craig Barrett' on Google, the top result links to my hideous little web page." I tried it and found myself staring at a glittering pink screen full of animated unicorns and rainbows.

Move Fast and Break Things: How Facebook, Google, and Amazon Cornered Culture and Undermined Democracy
by Jonathan Taplin
Published 17 Apr 2017

The TV producer Kurt Sutter (Sons of Anarchy) spoke for many when he said, “Google spends millions of dollars every year fronting a campaign to crush the rights of creatives.” In later chapters I will lay out both the breadth of the resistance and some of my own ideas to solve this problem. But first we need to understand how we got here. CHAPTER ONE The Great Disruption “Don’t Be Evil” —Google motto 1. The beginnings of the technical and social revolution that Martin Luther King referenced in his 1968 sermon at the National Cathedral were under way even as he was speaking. The revolution began in the moral precepts of the counterculture: decentralize control and harmonize people.

…

The combination of scale and network effects makes it very hard to dislodge the winners, especially if you are in a business like tech, which is so lightly regulated. 4. Branding becomes critical. The brand becomes a promise of value to consumers. Apple gets superior margins because of its brand promise for quality and elegant design. The brand promise also helps you defend yourself against government intrusion. Google’s original “Don’t be evil” brand promise gave them a patina of social entrepreneurship that helps protect them from accusations of monopoly power tactics. As John Seely Brown has pointed out, the end of the decentralized Web that Engelbart and the PARC visionaries had imagined occurs at this point, when “we moved from products to platforms, which let the network effect play out in a hub and spoke model.”

…

As Ken Auletta pointed out in his book Googled: The End of the World as We Know It, Page and Brin never asked for permission to copy the entire World Wide Web onto their servers and then index it. Ayn Rand’s famous quotation “Who will stop me?” seems to be the founding principle of Google. Page’s constant assurances in his initial shareholder letter that everyone should trust his and Brin’s good intentions are critical to this Randian mind-set: “Don’t be evil. We believe strongly that in the long term, we will be better served—as shareholders and in all other ways—by a company that does good things for the world even if we forgo some short term gains. This is an important aspect of our culture and is broadly shared within the company.” This naïveté, this barely disguised will to power, this dialectic—Google will do whatever it wants without asking permission, and the results will be so awesome that no one will complain—stands at the heart of the company’s success.

The Corona Crash: How the Pandemic Will Change Capitalism
by Grace Blakeley
Published 14 Oct 2020

Sweezy, Monopoly Capital: An Essay on the American Economic and Social Order, New York: Monthly Review Press, 1966; John Bellamy Foster, ‘Monopoly-Finance Capital’, Monthly Review, vol. 58, no. 7, December 2006. 5 Ryan Banerjee and Boris Hofmann, ‘The rise of zombie firms: causes and consequences’, Bank for International Settlements Quarterly Review, September 2018. 6 Michalis Nikiforos, ‘When Two Minskyan Processes Meet a Large Shock: The Economic Implications of the Pandemic’, Levy Economics Institute, Policy Note 2020/1 (March 2020). 7 Martin Arnold and Brendan Greeley, ‘Central Banks Stimulus Is Distorting Financial Markets, BIS Finds’, Financial Times, 7 October 2019. 8 Jesse Colombo, ‘The US Is Experiencing a Dangerous Corporate Debt Bubble’, Forbes, 29 August 2018; Phillip Inman, ‘Corporate Debt Could Be the Next Sub-Prime Crisis, Warns Banking Body’, Guardian, 30 June 2019. 9 Matthew Watson, ‘Re-establishing What Went Wrong Before: The Greenspan Put as Macroeconomic Modellers’ New Normal’, Journal of Critical Globalisation Studies, no. 7 (2014): 80–101. 10 Alfie Stirling, Just about Managing Demand: Reforming the UK’s Macroeconomic Policy Framework, London: Institute for Public Policy Research [IPPR], 2018. 11 Marx, Capital, Vol. 1, p. 929. 12 Rana Foroohar, Don’t Be Evil: The Case Against Big Tech, New York: Currency/Random House, 2019. 13 See, e.g., Jonathan Taplin, Move Fast and Break Things: How Google, Facebook and Amazon Cornered Culture and Undermined Democracy, New York: Little, Brown, 2017, in which the author makes the now well-known claim that ‘Data is … the new oil’. 14 Foroohar, Don’t Be Evil; Martin Wolf, ‘Why Rigged Capitalism Is Damaging Liberal Democracy’, Financial Times, 18 September 2019. 15 Foroohar, Don’t Be Evil. 16 Matt Phillips, ‘Investors Bet Giant Companies Will Dominate After Crisis’, New York Times, 28 April 2020. 17 Matthew Vincent, ‘Loss-Making Tech Companies Are Floating Like It’s 1999’, Financial Times, 16 June 2019. 18 Martin Wolf, ‘Corporate Savings Are Contributing to the Savings Glut’, Financial Times, 17 November 2015; Peter Chen, Loukas Karabarbounis and Brent Neiman, ‘The Global Corporate Saving Glut: Long-Term Evidence’, VoxEU, CEPR Policy Portal, 5 April 2017. 19 Rana Forooha, ‘Tech Companies Are the New Investment Banks’, Financial Times, 11 February 2018. 20 Andres Diaz, ‘I’m a Small Business Owner.

Don't Be Evil: How Big Tech Betrayed Its Founding Principles--And All of US
by Rana Foroohar
Published 5 Nov 2019

Published in the United States by Currency, an imprint of Random House, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York. currencybooks.com CURRENCY and its colophon are trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC. LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA Names: Foroohar, Rana, author. Title: Don’t be evil / Rana Foroohar. Description: First edition. | New York : Currency, [2019] | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2019023898 (print) | LCCN 2019023899 (ebook) | ISBN 9781984823984 (hardcover) | ISBN 9781984823991 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Internet industry—Moral and ethical aspects—United States. | Information technology—Economic aspects—United States. | Corporate power—United States. | Business and politics—United States.

…

I hope that it will serve as a wake-up call, not just for executives and policy makers but for anyone who believes in a future in which the benefits of innovation and progress outweigh the costs to individuals and to society. It’s in everyone’s interest to believe that we can create that kind of future. Because as we’ve come to understand all too clearly over the past few years, once people stop believing that a system is good for them, the system falls apart. CHAPTER 1 A Summary of the Case “Don’t be evil” is the famous first line of Google’s original Code of Conduct, what seems today like a quaint relic of the company’s early days, when the crayon colors of the Google logo still conveyed the cheerful, idealistic spirit of the enterprise. How long ago that feels. Of course, it would be unfair to accuse Google of being actively evil.

…

By the early 2000s, as the company moved toward the inevitable payday of IPO—the dream of every Silicon Valley entrepreneur or investor—there was little remaining pretense that Google was anything other than a leviathan of a company looking to monetize everything that it could in preparation for its debut on the public markets. As for the infamous “Don’t be evil” mantra? “It’s bullshit,” said Jobs.7 This ideological shift was most publicly marked by the 2001 hiring of Schmidt. Around that time, Google was still ramping up its advertising model, and it wasn’t yet clear what a gold mine it would become. The investors felt that adult supervision was needed, in the form of a hard-nosed manager who could turn the company’s brilliant ideas into soaring stock prices.

What Would Google Do?
by Jeff Jarvis
Published 15 Feb 2009

But neither should they be dictatorships. They should be—but too rarely are—meritocracies. Your challenge is to get good ideas to surface and survive from within and without and to enable customers and employees to improve your ideas and products. Don’t be evil We can’t leave a chapter about ethics and Google without addressing its famous self-admonition: “Don’t be evil.” Larry Page and Sergey Brin interpreted the pledge this way in a letter they wrote before their 2004 initial public offering: “We believe strongly that in the long term, we will be better served—as shareholders and in all other ways—by a company that does good things for the world even if we forego some short-term gains.

…

Google Rules New Relationship • Give the people control and we will use it • Dell hell • Your worst customer is your best friend • Your best customer is your partner New Architecture • The link changes everything • Do what you do best and link to the rest • Join a network • Be a platform • Think distributed New Publicness • If you’re not searchable, you won’t be found • Everybody needs Googlejuice • Life is public, so is business • Your customers are your ad agency New Society • Elegant organization New Economy • Small is the new big • The post-scarcity economy • Join the open-source, gift economy • The mass market is dead—long live the mass of niches • Google commodifies everything • Welcome to the Google economy New Business Reality • Atoms are a drag • Middlemen are doomed • Free is a business model • Decide what business you’re in New Attitude • There is an inverse relationship between control and trust • Trust the people • Listen New Ethic • Make mistakes well • Life is a beta • Be honest • Be transparent • Collaborate • Don’t be evil New Speed • Answers are instantaneous • Life is live • Mobs form in a flash New Imperatives • Beware the cash cow in the coal mine • Encourage, enable, and protect innovation • Simplify, simplify • Get out of the way If Google Ruled the World Media • The Google Times: Newspapers, post-paper • Googlewood: Entertainment, opened up • GoogleCollins: Killing the book to save it Advertising • And now, a word from Google’s sponsors Retail • Google Eats: A business built on openness • Google Shops: A company built on people Utilities • Google Power & Light: What Google would do • GT&T: What Google should do Manufacturing • The Googlemobile: From secrecy to sharing • Google Cola: We’re more than consumers Service • Google Air: A social marketplace of customers • Google Real Estate: Information is power Money • Google Capital: Money makes networks • The First Bank of Google: Markets minus middlemen Public Welfare • St.

…

Out of that comes a better service for every user, more opportunities to build traffic and revenue, a rich relationship of trust among those users and Flickr, and even new products. All from just listening. New Ethic Make mistakes well Life is a beta Be honest Be transparent Collaborate Don’t be evil Make mistakes well We are ashamed to make mistakes—as well we should be, yes? It’s our job to get things right, right? So when we make mistakes, our instinct is to shrink into a ball and wish them away. Correcting errors, though necessary, is embarrassing. But the truth about truth is itself counterintuitive: Corrections do not diminish credibility.

The Filter Bubble: What the Internet Is Hiding From You
by Eli Pariser
Published 11 May 2011

It’d be one thing if we all knew everything about each other. It’s another when centralized entities know a lot more about us than we know about each other—and sometimes, more than we know about ourselves. If knowledge is power, then asymmetries in knowledge are asymmetries in power. Google’s famous “Don’t be evil” motto is presumably intended to allay some of these concerns. I once explained to a Google search engineer that while I didn’t think the company was currently evil, it seemed to have at its fingertips everything it needed to do evil if it wished. He smiled broadly. “Right,” he said. “We’re not evil.

…

But when users protest Facebook’s constantly shifting and eroding privacy policy, Zuckerberg often shrugs it off with the caveat emptor posture that if you don’t want to use Facebook, you don’t have to. It’s hard to imagine a major phone company getting away with saying, “We’re going to publish your phone conversations for anyone to hear—and if you don’t like it, just don’t use the phone.” Google tends to be more explicitly moral in its public aspirations; its motto is “Don’t be evil,” while Facebook’s unofficial motto is “Don’t be lame.” Nevertheless, Google’s founders also sometimes play a get-out-of-jail-free card. “Some say Google is God. Others say Google is Satan,” says Sergey Brin. “But if they think Google is too powerful, remember that with search engines, unlike other companies, all it takes is a single click to go to another search engine.

…

Actually, building an informed and engaged citizenry—in which people have the tools to help manage not only their own lives but their own communities and societies—is one of the most fascinating and important engineering challenges. Solving it will take a great deal of technical skill mixed with humanistic understanding—a real feat. We need more programmers to go beyond Google’s famous slogan, “Don’t be evil.” We need engineers who will do good. And we need them soon: If personalization remains on its current trajectory, as the next chapter describes, the near future could be stranger and more problematic than many of us would imagine. 7 What You Want, Whether You Want It or Not There will always be plenty of things to compute in the detailed affairs of millions of people doing complicated things.

Thinking About It Only Makes It Worse: And Other Lessons From Modern Life
by David Mitchell
Published 4 Nov 2014

So, if those universities with which BPP have been negotiating feel they could make savings by outsourcing their back-office functions (which sounds like a euphemism for getting a colostomy bag) but would be unwilling to cut costs without being able to blame a private company, maybe that’s a sign that they’re the wrong savings. If not, and if failing to make such cuts jeopardises those institutions, I hope they’ll find the courage to reform themselves without holding hands with a profiteer. * There’s something fishy about Google’s motto, “Don’t Be Evil.” I’m not saying it’s controversial but it makes you think, “Why bring that up? Why have you suddenly put the subject of being evil on the agenda?” It’s suspicious in the same way as Ukip constantly pointing out how racist they’re not – which my colleague Charlie Brooker said on 10 O’Clock Live was “rather like someone who’s just moved in next door saying, ‘Hi, I’m Geoff, your non-dogging neighbour.’”

…

But we mustn’t assume that the maxim was an attempt by executives to draw a line under some diabolical brainstorm in which the internet giant pulled itself back from the brink of green-lighting a scheme to grind our bones to make its bread. It could just as easily have come out of a discussion of the possibility of doing good. “Always do good”, “Try to do some good” or “Be good” might have been previous drafts of the motto, before they concluded that goodness was as impractical as malevolence was distasteful and decided on “Don’t Be Evil” as more realistic in a modern business environment. “Settling for one notch below altruism” is all the slogan really means. Still, I suppose we should be grateful for small mercies. And there’s no earthly reason why Google should do any good to anyone but itself – which is presumably why it pays so little tax.

…

As aspirations go, it’s not been looking particularly realistic of late as the corporation’s tax avoidance has become more evident, but it’s still a company that tries to generate a wholesome, quirky, Californian vibe. That’s why it called an operating system Cupcake. That’s why its offices are full of free snacks for employees. There’s still a faint echo of “Don’t Be Evil” in the think spaces and mood rooms, albeit with an irritating interrogative inflection. So it’s odd that it would voluntarily couple one of its products with that of a company with a shameful history of wringing money from the poorest people on Earth. To my mind, the risks involved in that association outweigh the fact that more people have heard of a KitKat than a key lime pie.

Dogfight: How Apple and Google Went to War and Started a Revolution
by Fred Vogelstein
Published 12 Nov 2013

But after the euphoria of the acquisition wore off, it became clear that even at Google getting Android off the ground was going to be one of the hardest things Rubin had undertaken in his life. Just navigating Google itself was initially a challenge for Rubin and his team. There was no hard-and-fast org chart, as in other companies. Every employee seemed right out of college. And the Google culture, with its famous “Don’t be evil” and “That’s not Googley” sanctimony, seemed weird for someone such as Rubin, who had already been in the workplace twenty years. He couldn’t even drive his car to work because it was too fancy for the Google parking lot. Google was by then filled with millionaires who had gotten rich on the 2004 IPO.

…

None of this made Jobs less angry at feeling forced to go after Google in the first place. He felt Brin and Page, people he once considered friends, had betrayed him. And he felt Schmidt, a member of his board, had dissembled. Jobs’s message to his executive team that day was strident: “These guys are lying to me, and I am not going to take it anymore. This Don’t Be Evil stuff is bullshit.” But he also felt vindicated—that Google was no longer going to be a threat. Schmidt, while still technically on the Apple board, was effectively no longer a board member. He was now leaving the room during all board discussions about the iPhone, which was increasingly what Apple board meetings were about.

…

More noticeably, he began seeking out public opportunities to attack Google and Android. A month after the Nexus One was released—and days after Jobs announced the first iPad—he tore into Google at an Apple employee meeting. “Apple did not enter the search business. So why did Google enter the phone business? Google wants to kill the iPhone. We won’t let them. Their Don’t Be Evil mantra? It’s bullshit.” In October, at the end of the quarterly earnings conference call with investors and Wall Street analysts, Jobs spent five minutes laying out in detail why Android was an inferior product in every way. He said Android was hard for consumers to use because every Android phone operated differently.

Robot Rules: Regulating Artificial Intelligence
by Jacob Turner
Published 29 Oct 2018

It’s what computers should do.126 Microsoft is not the first tech giant to consider an overarching moral principle ought to be applied to data science. Google’s original motto: “Don’t be evil” was a modern update to the Hippocratic Oath. Eric Schmidt, one of Google’s founders, and co-author Jonathan Rosenberg, have written that this motto:…genuinely expresses a company value and aspiration that is deeply felt by employees. But “Don’t be evil” is mainly another way to empower employees… Googlers do regularly check their moral compass when making decisions.127 Whether or not the above is true is a matter of some debate,128 but it is nonetheless significant that one of the major technology giants has consciously limited itself through the adoption of such an overarching principle.

…

Schmidt and Rosenberg described it as “a cultural lodestar that shines over all management layers, product plans and office politics”.129 Such principles can come back to bite their creators: in April 2018, The New York Times reported that various Google developers were protesting against the company’s collaboration with the US Department of Defense in using AI technology to scan military drone footage, known by the codename “Project Maven”. The developers wrote to CEO Sundar Pichai,130 citing the company’s own motto against it131:The argument that other firms, like Microsoft and Amazon, are also participating doesn’t make this any less risky for Google. Google’s unique history, its motto Don’t Be Evil, and its direct reach into the lives of billions of users set it apart.132 The disgruntled Google employees prevailed. In June 2018, Google announced that it had abandoned Project Maven.133 Around the same time, Google released a set of ethical principles, which included that it would not design or deploy AI in “[w]eapons or other technologies whose principal purpose or implementation is to cause or directly facilitate injury to people”.134 A motto, oath or principle is a useful starting point but to achieve the more complex aims of various ethical codes set out above, professional regulation will need to include mechanisms for standard setting, training and enforcement.

…

See Oren Etzioni, “A Hippocratic Oath for Artificial Intelligence Practitioners”, TechCrunch, https://​techcrunch.​com/​2018/​03/​14/​a-hippocratic-oath-for-artificial-intelligence-practitioners/​, accessed 1 June 2018. 127Eric Schmidt and Jonathan Rosenberg, How Google Works (London: Hachette UK, 2014). 128Leo Mirani, “What Google Really Means by ‘Don’t Be Evil’”, Quartz, 21 October 2014, https://​qz.​com/​284548/​what-google-really-means-by-dont-be-evil/​, accessed 1 June 2018. 129Eric Schmidt and Jonathan Rosenberg, How Google Works (London: Hachette UK, 2014). 130The text of the letter is available at: https://​static01.​nyt.​com/​files/​2018/​technology/​googleletter.​pdf, accessed 1 June 2018. 131Scott Shane and Daisuke Wakabayashi, “‘The Business of War’: Google Employees Protest Work for the Pentagon”, The New York Times, 4 April 2018, https://​www.​nytimes.​com/​2018/​04/​04/​technology/​google-letter-ceo-pentagon-project.​html, accessed 1 June 2018. 132Letter from various Google employees to Sundar Pichai, https://​static01.​nyt.​com/​files/​2018/​technology/​googleletter.​pdf, accessed 1 June 2018. 133Hannah Kuchler, “How Workers Forced Google to Drop Its Controversial ‘Project Maven’”, Financial Times, 27 June 2018, https://​www.​ft.​com/​content/​bd9d57fc-78cf-11e8-bc55-50daf11b720d, accessed 2 July 2018. 134Sundar Pichai, “AI at Google: Our Principles”, Google website, 7 June 2018, https://​blog.​google/​technology/​ai/​ai-principles/​, accessed 2 July 2018. 135For a similar proposal, see Joanna J.

The Snowden Files: The Inside Story of the World's Most Wanted Man
by Luke Harding
Published 7 Feb 2014

Vintage ISBN: 978-0-8041-7352-0 Vintage eBook ISBN: 978-0-8041-7353-7 www.vintagebooks.com v3.1 Contents Cover About the Author Title Page Copyright Foreword by Alan Rusbridger Prologue: The Rendezvous 1. TheTrueHOOHA 2. Civil Disobedience 3. The Source 4. Puzzle Palace 5. The Man in the Room 6. Scoop! 7. The Planet’s Most Wanted Man 8. All of the Signals All of the Time 9. You’ve Had Your Fun 10. Don’t Be Evil 11. Flight 12. Der Shitstorm! 13. The Broom Cupboard 14. Shoot the Messenger Epilogue: Exile Acknowledgements Foreword Edward Snowden is one of the most extraordinary whistleblowers in history. Never before has anyone scooped up en masse the top-secret files of the world’s most powerful intelligence organisations, in order to make them public.

…

‘It was an extremely bizarre situation,’ Johnson says. The British government had compelled a major newspaper to smash up its own computers. This extraordinary moment was half pantomime, half-Stasi. But it was not yet the high tide of British official heavy-handedness. That was still to come. 10 DON’T BE EVIL Silicon Valley, California Summer 2013 ‘Until they become conscious, they will never rebel.’ GEORGE ORWELL, 1984 It was an iconic commercial. To accompany the launch of the Macintosh in 1984, Steve Jobs created an advert that would captivate the world. It would take the theme of George Orwell’s celebrated dystopian novel and recast it – with Apple as Winston Smith.

…

At the same time, these firms vie for government contracts, hire ex-Washington staff for the inside track and spend millions lobbying for legislation in their favour. Clearly, the allegation that they were co-operating with America’s most powerful spy agency was a corporate disaster, as well as being an affront to the Valley’s self-image, and to the view of the tech industry as innovative and iconoclastic. Google prided itself on its mission statement ‘Don’t be evil’; Apple used the Jobsian imperative ‘Think Different’; Microsoft had the motto ‘Your privacy is our priority’. These corporate slogans now seemed to rebound upon their originators with mocking laughter. Before the Guardian published the PRISM story the paper’s US business reporter, Dominic Rushe, went through his contacts book.

The Code: Silicon Valley and the Remaking of America
by Margaret O'Mara
Published 8 Jul 2019

ELLEN ULLMAN, Life in Code, 19983 CONTENTS Also by Margaret O’Mara Title Page Copyright Dedication Epigraph List of Abbreviations Introduction: The American Revolution ACT ONE: START UP Arrivals Chapter 1: Endless Frontier Chapter 2: Golden State Chapter 3: Shoot the Moon Chapter 4: Networked Chapter 5: The Money Men Arrivals Chapter 6: Boom and Bust ACT TWO: PRODUCT LAUNCH Arrivals Chapter 7: The Olympics of Capitalism Chapter 8: Power to the People Chapter 9: The Personal Machine Chapter 10: Homebrewed Chapter 11: Unforgettable Chapter 12: Risky Business ACT THREE: GO PUBLIC Arrivals Chapter 13: Storytellers Chapter 14: California Dreaming Chapter 15: Made in Japan Chapter 16: Big Brother Chapter 17: War Games Chapter 18: Built on Sand ACT FOUR: CHANGE THE WORLD Arrivals Chapter 19: Information Means Empowerment Chapter 20: Suits in the Valley Chapter 21: Magna Carta Chapter 22: Don’t Be Evil Arrivals Chapter 23: The Internet Is You Chapter 24: Software Eats the World Chapter 25: Masters of the Universe Departure: Into the Driverless Car Photographs Acknowledgments Note on Sources Notes Image Credits Index About the Author LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS ACM: Association for Computing Machinery AEA: American Electronics Association AI: Artificial intelligence AMD: Advanced Micro Devices ARD: American Research and Development ARM: Advanced reduced-instruction-set microprocessor ARPA: Advanced Research Projects Agency, Department of Defense, renamed DARPA AWS: Amazon Web Services BBS: Bulletin Board Services CDA: Communications Decency Act of 1996 CPSR: Computer Professionals for Social Responsibility CPU: Central processing unit EDS: Electronic Data Systems EFF: Electronic Frontier Foundation EIT: Enterprise Integration Technologies ENIAC: Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer ERISA: Employee Retirement Income Security Act of 1974 FASB: Financial Accounting Standards Board FCC: Federal Communications Commission FTC: Federal Trade Commission GUI: Graphical user interface HTML: Hypertext markup language IC: Integrated circuit IPO: Initial public offering MIS: Management information systems MITI: Ministry of International Trade and Industry (of Japan) NACA: National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics, later superseded by NASA NASA: National Aeronautics and Space Administration NASD: National Association of Securities Dealers NDEA: National Defense Education Act NII: National Information Infrastructure NSF: National Science Foundation NVCA: National Venture Capital Association OS: Operating system OSRD: U.S.

…

With Doerr’s help, Gore’s policy aides began holding regular “Gore-Tech” meetings in California and in Washington, where awed thirtysomething Internet moguls would be seated amid the polished mahogany and gilt trim of the Vice President’s ceremonial office at the White House. It was a long way from drab tilt-ups and Homebrew swap meets and all-nighters in the PARC beanbag chairs. With the Internet boom, the men and women of Silicon Valley had become establishment power players like never before. CHAPTER 22 Don’t Be Evil As TechNet mobilized and Gore-Tech meetings proliferated, Microsoft was conspicuously absent. Awash in revenue from its total saturation of the PC platform, Bill Gates’s company didn’t have the same regulatory worries as the Silicon Valley crowd, and it was so large that it was a political force all on its own.

…

Giant computer companies roamed the earth and the Valley was saturated with Wall Street money, but Brin and Page promised a return to simpler and more idealistic times. Microsoft’s overreach and comeuppance seemed further validation that Silicon Valley had it right all along: promote the small, the entrepreneurial, the agile and collaborative. Don’t get big, don’t close yourself in, and, as Google’s widely touted corporate motto put it, “don’t be evil.” This mythos—the story that the Valley had told to itself again and again since the start of the 1960s, and then broadcast to the world ever since the days of Don Hoefler—overlooked the inconvenient reality that every start-up company in the region’s history eventually did one of two things. Most often, it went out of business.

Like, Comment, Subscribe: Inside YouTube's Chaotic Rise to World Domination
by Mark Bergen
Published 5 Sep 2022

Colleagues dubbed her “the Decider,” a play on President Bush’s nickname for himself. (They made her a T-shirt with a big Superwoman D.) Much of Google’s political identity was formed in opposition to the Machiavellian moralism of the Bush-Cheney era. Google coined a company creed in its early years—“Don’t be evil”—a corporate slogan for a company that hated slogans. It was meant to combat concerns that Google would do nefarious things with intimate details it had gathered from users’ internet searches. In practice the motto stood for Google’s steadfast belief that the internet was inherently a force for good.

…

“Most news organizations would think about this as an ethical question, not a legal one,” Jillian York, a director with the EFF, told reporters. “Giving corporations the power to censor sets a dangerous precedent.” In much of Europe, though, YouTube was criticized for not censoring enough. Google’s good standing on the Continent had already been slipping. European politicians accused the “don’t be evil” company of evading taxes, ignoring privacy, and behaving like a monopolist. Jewish groups would berate YouTube for giving airtime to Holocaust deniers. In 2013 Edward Snowden’s bombshell revelations included charges that the National Security Agency (NSA) had hacked into Google’s data centers.

…

Shortly after 11 a.m. that morning, Stapleton, draped in a green army jacket, led her colleagues, more than three thousand strong, out of their office to a small park near the Hudson where they gathered with megaphones. Others had marched out in London, Singapore, and Zurich. Protestors cried at Google HQ listening to a female engineer describe being drugged by a colleague at a corporate event. Googlers held signs that read: time’s up, tech and don’t be evil. In all, more than twenty thousand employees protested in fifty cities, a groundbreaking moment of white-collar activism, of Trump-era catharsis. A movement that could boil an ocean. The techie rebellion grabbed national headlines and, it seemed, made the company proud. Ruth Porat, Google’s CFO, would describe the event as “Googlers doing what Googlers do best.”

The Glass Half-Empty: Debunking the Myth of Progress in the Twenty-First Century
by Rodrigo Aguilera
Published 10 Mar 2020

For example, only one US investment banker was ever convicted for wrongdoing as a direct result of the financial crisis, and none in the UK at all.28 While in some cases freer markets did do away with some of the handicaps of excessive state intervention from the post-war era, the stunted prosperity of the Western working and middle classes since the 1980s in contrast to the skyrocketing accumulation of wealth by the corporate elite has much to do with governments abdicating on their responsibilities and allowing markets to regulate themselves. But it still begs the question of why self-regulation under capitalism can’t work. The answer lies in the nature of capitalism’s most important institution: the corporation. Don’t Be Evil, Don’t Be Stupid “Nothing is illegal if one hundred businessmen decide to do it.” — Andrew Young Just as we can reasonably expect political elites to push for their self-interest when they wriggle free of checks and balances, there is no reason to believe that firms will not do the same. The Iron Law of Oligarchy applies regardless of the nature of the institution.

…

Capitalist critic Naomi Wolf described this problem in a 2012 article on financial scandals: It is very hard, looking at the elaborate edifices of fraud that are emerging across the financial system, to ignore the possibility that this kind of silence — “the willingness to not rock the boat” — is simply rewarded by promotion to ever higher positions, ever greater authority. If you learn that rate-rigging and regulatory failures are systemic, but stay quiet, well, perhaps you have shown that you are genuinely reliable and deserve membership of the club.30 Yet it is telling that Google, once the brainchild of a pair of scruffy Stanford geeks whose motto was “Don’t be evil”, is now one of the most terrifying examples of so-called “surveillance capitalism”, seemingly hell-bent on accumulating (and profiting from) all the information it can get its hands on. In 2015 the company finally ditched the original motto since the hypocrisy was just too obvious, and at least, according to one account was actually being taken seriously by some of the company’s staff.31 That these excesses can be reined in by the power of free markets to discipline its worst offenders is undoubtedly one of the most damaging myths peddled by the advocates of laissez-faire.

…

“Why Only One Top Banker Went to Jail for the Financial Crisis”, The New York Times, 30 Apr. 2014, https://www.nytimes.com/2014/05/04/magazine/only-one-top-banker-jail-financial-crisis.html 29 Friedman, M., “The Social Responsibility of Business is to Increase its Profits”, New York Times Magazine, 13 Sep. 1970, http://umich.edu/~thecore/doc/Friedman.pdf 30 Wolf, N., “This Global Financial Fraud and its Gatekeepers”, Guardian, 14 Jul. 2012, https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2012/jul/14/global-financial-fraud-gatekeepers 31 Apparently Google’s overlords were concerned that employees were taking it literally and objecting to some of the company’s profit-making proposals: Moyer, J.W., “Alphabet, now Google’s overlord, ditches ‘Don’t be evil’ for ‘do the right thing’”, Washington Post, 5 Oct. 2015, https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2015/10/05/alphabet-now-googles-overlord-ditches-dont-be-evil-in-favor-of-do-the-right-thing/ 32 Andrews, E.L., “Greenspan concedes error on regulation”, New York Times, 23 Oct. 2008, https://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/23/business/worldbusiness/23iht-24greenspan.17202367.html 33 “Your Company is not a Democracy”, Entrepreneur Europe, 30 Jun. 2010, https://www.entrepreneur.com/article/207280 34 Wadhwa, V., “Democracy is a great thing, except in the workplace”, Washington Post, 6 Jul. 2016, https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/innovations/wp/2016/06/07/democracy-is-a-great-thing-except-in-the-workplace/ 35 Barro, R.J., “Democracy and Growth”, NBER Working Paper Series, 4909, Oct. 1994, https://www.nber.org/papers/w4909.pdf 36 The idea that sociopathy is rampant among CEOs and senior managers is not an urban legend although studies vary from 4-5% to as many as one fifth of high level executives. de Vries, M.F.R., “The Psychopath in the C Suite: Redefining the SOB”, INSEAD, 2012, https://sites.insead.edu/facultyresearch/research/doc.cfm?

My Start-Up Life: What A
by Ben Casnocha and Marc Benioff
Published 7 May 2007

Here’s a company that’s found the balance: Google. Google’s food for employees is terrific. The chairs and tables on which they eat are pathetic. They cut the right corners. They’re mediocre in the right places. They’re not mediocre, for instance, when it comes to values (“Don’t be evil”). Who would settle for “good” and say “Don’t be evil most of the time?” At Comcate we were once preparing a response to a request for proposals. The RFP was twenty-five pages long and asked for what seemed like extraneous information. Nevertheless, we slaved away, carefully preparing each section, debating the content of the introduction and conclusion, and second-guessing our choice of graphics.

With a Little Help
by Cory Efram Doctorow , Jonathan Coulton and Russell Galen
Published 7 Dec 2010

And of course, they google all of us, everyone who works on anything 'sensitive.'" 642 "Naturally," Greg said. He felt like he was going to throw up. He felt like never using a search engine again. "How the hell did this happen? It's such a good place. 'Don't be evil,' right?" That was the corporate motto, and for Greg, it had been a huge part of his reason for taking his fresh-minted computer science PhD from Stanford directly to Google. 643 Maya's laugh was bitter and cynical. "Don't be evil? Come on, Greg. Don't you remember what it was like when we started censoring the Chinese search results, and we all asked how that could be anything but evil? The company line was hilarious: 'We're not doing evil -- we're giving them access to a better search tool!

…

The company line was hilarious: 'We're not doing evil -- we're giving them access to a better search tool! If we showed them search results they couldn't get to, that would just frustrate them. It would be a bad user experience. If we hadn't lost our don't-be-evil cherry by then, we surely did the day we took that one." 644 "Now what?" Greg pushed a dog away from him and Maya looked hurt. 645 "Now you're a person of interest, Greg. Googlestalked. Now, you live your life with someone watching over your shoulder, all the time. You know the mission statement, right? 'Organize all human knowledge.' That's everything.

New Laws of Robotics: Defending Human Expertise in the Age of AI
by Frank Pasquale
Published 14 May 2020

Some mocked what they saw as a belated show of concern. By 2013, the Snowden revelations had shown how useful big tech’s data was to law enforcement and military interests. Google’s former CEO, Eric Schmidt, had headed the Defense Innovation Advisory Board for years. Once famous for the motto “Don’t be evil,” Google has shed even that modest ethical standard.81 Other critics claimed that Google had not done nearly enough for the nation of its birth. There is an AI arms race, and if the United States can’t tap its top tech companies, nations with pliant plutocrats will pull ahead. Sandro Gaycken, a senior adviser to NATO, commented, “These naive hippy developers from Silicon Valley don’t understand—the CIA should force them.”82 Uncooperative firms risk America’s falling behind China and even Russia in an AI arms race.

…

Noam Schreiber and Kate Conger, “The Great Google Revolt,” New York Times Magazine, February 18, 2020, https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/02/18/magazine/google-revolt.html; Letter from Google Employees to Sundar Pichai, Google Chief Executive, 2018, https://static01.nyt.com/files/2018/technology/googleletter.pdf; Scott Shane and Daisuke Wakabayashi, “ ‘The Business of War’: Google Employees Protest Work for the Pentagon,” New York Times, April 4, 2018, https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/04/technology/google-letter-ceo-pentagon-project.html. 81. Kate Conger, “Google Removes ‘Don’t Be Evil’ Clause from Its Code of Conduct,” Gizmodo, May 18, 2018, https://gizmodo.com/google-removes-nearly-all-mentions-of-dont-be-evil-from-1826153393. 82. Tom Upchurch, “How China Could Beat the West in the Deadly Race for AI Weapons,” Wired, August 8, 2018, https://www.wired.co.uk/article/artificial-intelligence-weapons-warfare-project-maven-google-china. 83.

…

George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, Philosophy in the Flesh: The Embodied Mind and the Challenge to Western Thought (New York: Basic Books, 1999), 4. 49. Nick Bostrom, Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 134–135. 50. For examples of such shortcomings, see Rana Foroohar, Don’t Be Evil: How Big Tech Betrayed Its Founding Principles—And All of Us (New York: Currency, 2019); Amy Webb, The Big Nine: How the Tech Titans and Their Thinking Machines Could Warp Humanity (New York: Public Affairs, 2019). 51. Byron Reese categorizes these metaphysical questions with great acuity in The Fourth Age: Smart Robots, Conscious Computers, and the Future of Humanity (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2018), 15–54. 52.

The Black Box Society: The Secret Algorithms That Control Money and Information
by Frank Pasquale
Published 17 Nov 2014

Google’s transparency about advertising delivered high quality results and gained trust.66 Early search leaders who succumbed to the siren song of ad-disguising drove their users away with irrelevant links while Google’s audience grew. As more people signed into its system, Google learned more about them and became ever better at tailoring its search results.67 Its ad income increased as its targeting improved. This triumph of “Don’t Be Evil” is still a celebrated Silicon Valley success story. Patiently gathering data, the company entrenched its privileged position between advertisers, content providers, and audiences.68 But in 2012, as it moved from general purpose search into specialized fields like shopping, Google began to back away from strong separation of paid and editorial material.69 The Federal Trade Commission strongly encourages search engines to label sponsored content,70 and has reserved the right to fi le suit for unfair and deceptive practices against any search engine that fails to do so.

…

Users lack both the ability and the incentive to detect manipulation as long as they are getting “good enough” results. So we’re stuck. And again the question arises: With whom? The exciting and radical Internet platforms that used to feel like playmates are looking more like the airlines and cable companies that we love to hate. “Don’t Be Evil” is a thing of the past; you can’t form a trusting relationship with a black box. Google argues that its vast database of information and queries reveals user intentions and thus makes its search ser vices demonstrably better than those of its whippersnapper rivals. But in doing so, it neutralizes the magic charm it has used for years to fend off regulators.

…

Note that in each case, Google, like the rating agencies discussed earlier, blamed public interpretation of the result rather than taking responsibility for it. 83. “Autocomplete,” Google. Available at https://support.google.com /web search /answer/106230. (It also specifies that Autocomplete cannot be turned off.) 84. Evgeny Morozov, “Don’t Be Evil,” The New Republic, July 30, 2011, http://www.newrepublic.com /article /books /magazine /91916/google-schmidt -obama-gates-technocrats. 85. Evan McMorris-Santoro, “Search Engine Expert: Rick Santorum’s New Crusade against Google Is Total Nonsense” (Sept. 2011). Talking Points Memo. Available at http://2012.talkingpointsmemo.com /2011/09/search-en gine -expert-rick-santorums -new-crusade -against-google -is -total-nonsense 254 NOTES TO PAGES 73–74 .php?

The Shame Machine: Who Profits in the New Age of Humiliation
by Cathy O'Neil
Published 15 Mar 2022

This punching-up campaign, like others, shamed the target for betraying its principles. In Google’s case, the values in question were clear for all to see. In the prospectus for its 2004 public stock offering, the Google founders had inserted, a bit ostentatiously, a clause in which they vowed to distinguish themselves morally from their money-grubbing competitors. Don’t be evil. We believe strongly that in the long term, we will be better served—as shareholders and in all other ways—by a company that does good things for the world even if we forgo some short term gains. This is an important aspect of our culture and is broadly shared within the company. This lofty promise made the company especially vulnerable to Gebru’s damning charges.

…

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT she denounced the company for censoring her: Casey Newton, “The Withering Email That Got an Ethical AI Researcher Fired at Google,” Platformer, December 3, 2020, https://www.platformer.news/​p/the-withering-email-that-got-an-ethical. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT “Don’t be evil”: Larry W. Sonsini, David J. Segre, and William H. Hinman, Amendment No. 4 to Form S-1 Registration Statement, Google, July 26, 2004, https://www.sec.gov/​Archives/​edgar/​data/​1288776/​000119312504124025/​ds1a.htm. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT “research integrity and academic freedom”: “Standing with Dr.

The New Silk Roads: The Present and Future of the World
by Peter Frankopan
Published 14 Jun 2018

But for Warner, what was truly unforgivable was the fact that American companies ‘have bastardised themselves so much to get into the Chinese market’; in fact, he said, US businesses were guilty of nothing less than ‘prostituting themselves’.4 As it subsequently turned out, these include Facebook, which has data-sharing partnerships with at least four major Chinese electronics businesses – all of which have close ties to the government in Beijing.5 The fact that this was not disclosed during high-profile hearings in Washington tells its own story about the steps corporations are willing to take in pursuit of opportunities – as a strongly worded statement from the bipartisan House of Representatives Energy and Commerce Committee explained.6 That was issued before it emerged that Facebook had been sharing user data with four firms – Huawei, Lenovo, Oppo and TCL – that have been flagged as national security threats by US intelligence.7 The relentless search for profit is mirrored by Google’s decision to develop a search engine, codenamed Dragonfly, to block websites and searches on topics to do with human rights, religion and other sensitive subjects, and that would be acceptable to the Chinese authorities – giving the company access to a huge market. Perhaps not surprisingly, this has led to considerable soul-searching within Google itself, a company that used to have the motto ‘Don’t be evil’ enshrined within its code of conduct.8 The dropping of the slogan in the early summer of 2018 is not just a sign of the times; it is a sign of the realities that go with putting the priorities of shareholders above those of others.9 The demonisation of China in various forms played an important role in the presidential election campaign.

…

Dance, ‘Facebook Gave Data Access to Chinese Firm Flagged by US Intelligence’, New York Times, 5 June 2018. 6House of Representatives, Energy and Commerce Committee, Press Release, ‘Walden and Pallone on Facebook’s Data-Sharing Partnerships with Chinese Companies’, 6 June 2018. 7Ali Breland, ‘Facebook reveals data-sharing partnerships, ties to Chinese firms in 700-page document dump’, The Hill, 30 June 2018. 8Casey Newton, ‘Google’s ambitions for China could trigger a crisis inside the company’, The Verge, 18 August 2018. 9Kate Conger, ‘Google Removes “Don’t Be Evil” Clause from Its Code of Conduct’, Gizmodo, 18 May 2018. 10Good Morning America, Interview, ABC, 3 November 2015. 11Trump, Staten Island speech, ‘Trump: I’m So Happy China Is Upset; “They Have Waged Economic War Against Us” ’, Transcript on Real Clear Politics, 17 April 2016. 12The Economist, ‘The Economist interviews Donald Trump’, 3 September 2015. 13B.

Super Pumped: The Battle for Uber
by Mike Isaac
Published 2 Sep 2019

In a cramped garage in 1998, Page and Brin founded a search engine to perform a task that sounded bonkers; “to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.” It was the exact type of moonshot thinking venture capitalists encouraged. But while the Google founders were excited to change the world, they didn’t want to make decisions based on what the money men wanted. The motto “Don’t be evil”‡‡ became synonymous with Google’s founders and their approach, the message being “even though we’re growing into a mature company, we won’t be doing terrible things for money.” In 2004, when Google undertook its IPO, it used a controversial financial instrument called a “dual-class stock structure.”

…

Chapter 8 notes †† Not every startup decides to take on venture capital. These companies are said to be “bootstrapped,” or entirely self-funded. Bootstrapping founders keep all the equity in the company and reap all the rewards if the startup succeeds. Their founders also go broke when they fail. ‡‡ Google removed the “Don’t be evil” mantra from the preface of its corporate code of conduct in 2018. §§ Founder worship of Zuckerberg evaporated after 2016, when news coverage of events ranging from the presidential election in the United States to reported ethnic cleansing in Myanmar suggested that Facebook lacked oversight of its platform.

…

See also Jay-Z Casino Royale, 44 The Castro, 47–48 CBS, 131 Chai, Nelson, 332 Chengdu, China, 142, 146 Cheng Wei, 141–42 Cherry, 188 Chicago, Illinois, 55, 83, 84, 165, 204, 292 China, 122, 140–52, 153–55, 187, 202, 211, 245, 257, 258, 312 Christensen, Clayton, 75 Citi Bike, 134 Clark, Craig, 258, 259 Clinton, Hillary, campaign of, 200, 201 CNBC, 273 CNN, 273, 303 Coca-Cola, 189–90 Code Conference, 176, 177, 178, 179, 180 Code.org, 92n Cohler, Matt, 283, 293–95, 296–305, 313, 315, 324–25 COIN program, 166, 178, 257, 259 Colorado, 115 Communication Workers Union, 204 Communist Party, 141, 204 Compaq, 67 Congress, 200 Cook, Tim, 154, 157, 158, 162, 163–64, 264 Cooley, 289 Costolo, Dick, 140 Coulter, Jim, 277–78 Course, David, 67 Covington & Burling, 224 Covington & Burling, 260, 269–70, 271, 310 Craig, Daniel, 44 Craigslist, 28 the Creamery, 4, 42 Creative Artists Agency (CAA), 23, 189 Credit Suisse First Boston, 67 CrowdFlower, 46 Cuban, Mark, 31 Cue, Eddy, 157–58, 159, 160–62, 163, 245 Cupertino, California, 158, 160, 161 Curb, 113 DARPA Robotics Challenge, 107 Darwins, 163, 163n Davos, Switzerland, 31 De Blasio, Bill, 116, 116n, 117 Dehli, India, 261 #deleteUber campaign, 208–10, 254 Dell, Michael, 67 Demeter, Steve, 39 Department of Defense, 107 Deutsche Bank, 69 Diaz, Cameron, 98 DiCaprio, Leonardo, 193 Dickenson, Texas, 66 DiDi, 141–42, 146, 147–52, 187, 202, 257, 258 Didi Chuxing, 141–42 Didi Dache, 122, 122n, 142 Diller, Barry, 307–8, 320, 333 Doerr, John, 35–37, 38, 39, 40, 201 DogVacay, 65 Dole, Bob, 229 DoorDash, 9 Dorsey, Jack, 202 Dropbox, 6 Drummond, David, 99, 100, 105, 106, 158, 176, 178–79, 180 eBay, 27, 43, 65, 169–71, 312 Einstein, Albert, 54 Eisner, Michael, 23 Ellison, Larry, 67 Elysian Hotel, 165 Encore Las Vegas, 7 England, Erich, xv–xvii, 243–44 Ericsson, 44 Expedia.com, 319, 320, 322, 327–28, 331 Expensify, 46 Facebook, 9–10, 21–22, 56, 74, 92n, 93, 113, 171, 174, 189, 333 copies Snapchat’s core feature, 235 dual-class structure and, 77 ex-Uber employees at, 224 IPO of, 5, 97 politics and, 200–201 reliance on advertising, 154 Sidecar and, 86 SREs at, 215 Uber recruits from, 4 women employees at, 226 Fandango, 92 Fannie Mae, 33 FBI, 171 Federal Reserve Bank, 27, 33, 34 Fenton, Peter, 283, 293–305 Fidelity Investments, 97, 297n, 300 First Round Capital, 57, 288, 288n, 289, 293, 326 Flipboard, 92n Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, 260 Forstall, Scott, 38 Formspring, 46 Fortune magazine, 127–28 Four Seasons Hotel, 105, 265 Foursqure, 55 Fowler, Susan J., 196, 199, 213–22, 223–26, 235, 241–42, 254, 285 Fox News, 204 Freddie Mac, 33 Freitas, Ryan, 28 Fucked Company, 28, 31 FuncoLand, 39 Gallagher, Leigh, 127–28 Gap Inc., 189 Gates, Bill, 37, 67 Gawker, 205 Geidt, Austin, 13, 60–62, 63, 82, 86, 192–93 General Electric, 314, 319 Gicinto, Nick, 257 Gingrich, Newt, 229 Giron, Joe, 156 Glade Brook Capital Partners, 300 Gladwell, Malcolm, 126 Go-Jek, 187 Gold Club, 192 Goldman Sachs, 69, 93, 100, 132 Gomez, Henry, 313 Google, 4–6, 9, 31, 36, 96–99, 99n, 147, 158, 172, 195 as advertising company, 154 “Don’t be evil” mantra of, 76–77, 76n Google Capital, 100 Google Glass, 177n Google Maps, 107, 148 Googleplex, 105, 107, 181 Google Ventures, 98–101, 99n, 105–7, 157, 202, 283, 326 Google X, 105–6, 109–10 Gulfstream V, 178 headquarters of, 105 HR and employees of, 224–26, 333 IPO of, 76–77 self-driving cars and, 105–10, 176–77, 180, 232–35, 233–36 Trump’s election and, 199–200 Gore-Coty, Pierre-Dimitry, 309 GQ magazine, 119, 120, 221 Grab, 148, 150, 187, 258, 259–60, 333 Graf, Daniel, 237, 309 Gramercy Park Hotel, 127, 130 Graves, Molly, 56 Graves, Ryan, 13, 63, 82, 124, 135, 165, 191, 309, 312–13, 321, 324, 341 allegiance to Kalanick, 97, 270–72, 287–88, 299, 301 background of, 54–55 Lyft and, 86 selected to be Uber’s first CEO, 55–59 on Uber’s board, 79–80 Great Recession, 33–34, 132 Green, Logan, 85, 86, 120, 186, 187, 188, 189 Greyball, xvii, xviii, 242–53, 254 Greylock Partners, 74 Groupon, 77 Grubhub, 65 Guadalajara, Mexico, 172–74 Guetta, David, 7 Gurgaon, India, 149–50 Gurley, John, 66 Gurley, John William “Bill,” 14, 69n, 187, 202, 255, 264n, 270, 272, 274, 276, 279, 288n after showdown, 308–10 annoyance with Kalanick, 122–26 attempts to find Kalanick’s replacement and, 314–16, 321 blogging by, 125 confers with spurned investors, 288–89 connects Kalanick and Michael, 93–94 desire for proper corporate governance, 332, 334–35 fundraising and, 92 Grand Bargain and, 326–27, 331 investment talent of, 64–71, 78–80 plan to force Kalanick’s hand, 289–91, 292–306, 292n at SXSW, 125–26 the syndicate and, 282–86, 303–4 on Uber’s board, 79–80 wishes Kalanick well, 299 Gurley, Lucia, 66 Gutmann, Amy, 214–15 H&R Block, 249 Hacker News, 156, 159 Hales, Charlie, xii, xiii Harford, Barney, 331, 331n Harvey, Kevin, 70 Hayes, Rob, 57, 63, 78, 288, 288n, 293 Hazelbaker, Jill, 225, 237, 239, 240 “Heaven,” 156, 259 Heidrick & Struggles, 312–13, 324 “Hell,” 257 Henley, Mat, 178, 259 Hewlett-Packard, 144, 312, 313, 314, 323 Highway 101, 28 Holden, Jeff, 120 Holder, Eric, 224, 225–26, 254, 260, 266, 275, 283 Holder Report, 254, 266, 269–81, 283, 296, 299, 341 Holiday Inn, 265, 266 Hollywood, 9, 24 Holt, Rachel, 237, 309, 331 Holzwarth, Gabi, 179–80, 193, 194, 230, 249–53 “the Homeshow,” 95 Hornsey, Liane, 226, 256 Hourdajian, Nairi, 126–28, 130–131 Houston, Texas, 66 Huffington, Arianna, 127, 238, 256, 287, 289, 301–5, 307, 325 continued support for Kalanick, 270–74 joins board of directors, 226–30 joins Kalanick after his mother’s death, 264–65 release of Holder Report and, 276–80 Huffington, Michael, 228–29 Huffington Post, 229 Hummer Winblad Venture Partners, 65, 70 Hyderabad, India, 149 Ibiza, Spain, 193 ICE, 206 Illinois, 113 IMEI, 154–55, 157 Immelt, Jeff, 313–14, 319, 320–22, 323, 324 InAuth, Inc., 155, 156–57 India, 148–50, 166–67, 187, 203, 257, 259 rape scandal in, 166, 261, 262, 285, 337 taxis and, 148–49 Indonesia, 259–60 The Information, 253 Instacart, 9 Instagram, 9, 74, 96–97, 200, 235 Intel, 35, 193n InterActiveCorp, 307, 320, 333 Internet Explorer, 69 iOS software, 154–55, 157, 159, 162 iPhone, 36–39, 44, 58, 59, 154–55, 157, 160, 163, 176, 218 iPod, 35 Iran, 320 iRide, 113 Isaac, Mike, 127n, 241, 279–80, 280n, 295, 296, 305–6, 339–40 iTunes, 35, 37 Ive, Jonathan, 38 Jacobin, 205, 207 the JamPad, 47–48, 49 Janklow, Mort, 230 Jay-Z, 7–8, 54, 194 Jeopardy!

Surveillance Valley: The Rise of the Military-Digital Complex
by Yasha Levine
Published 6 Feb 2018

My requests to Oakland were ignored and Google wasn’t talking either—trying to get answers from the company was like talking to a giant rock. My investigation stalled further when Oakland residents temporarily succeeded in getting the city to halt its plans for the DAC. Though Oakland’s police surveillance center was put on hold, the question remained: What could Google, a company obsessed with its progressive “Don’t Be Evil” image, offer a controversial police surveillance center? At the time, I was a reporter for Pando, a small but fearless San Francisco magazine that covered the politics and business of Silicon Valley. I knew that Google made most of its money through a sophisticated targeted advertising system that tracked its users and built predictive models of their behavior and interests.

…

It put whole libraries at your fingertips, allowed you to translate foreign languages on the fly, let you collaborate in real time with people on the other side of the planet. And you got all of it for free. It seemed to defy the laws of economics. Even as it expanded into a transnational multi-billion-dollar corporation, Google managed to retain its geekily innocent “Don’t Be Evil” image. It convinced its users that everything it did was driven by a desire to help humanity. That’s the story you’ll find in just about every popular book on Google: a gee-whiz tale about two brilliant nerds from Stanford who turned a college project into an epoch-defining New Economy dynamo, a company that embodied every utopian promise of the networked society: empowerment, knowledge, democracy.

…

Rather, Gmail understood that ‘pregnant’ in this case wasn’t a good thing because it was coupled with the word ‘affair.’ So it offered the services of a private investigator and a marriage therapist.”54 Showing ads for spy services to betrayed mothers? It wasn’t a good look for a company that still draped itself in a progressive “Don’t Be Evil” image. True to Larry Page’s paranoia about letting the privacy “toothpaste out of the tube,” Google stayed tightlipped about the inner workings of its email scanning program in the face of criticism. But a series of profiling and targeted advertising technology patents filed by the company that year offered a glimpse into how Gmail fit into Google’s multiplatform tracking and profiling system.55 They revealed that all email communication was subject to analysis and parsed for meaning; names were matched to real identities and addresses using third-party databases as well as contact information stored in a user’s Gmail address book; demographic and psychographic data, including social class, personality type, age, sex, personal income, and marital status were extracted; email attachments were scraped for information; even a person’s US residency status was established.

The Four: How Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Google Divided and Conquered the World
by Scott Galloway
Published 2 Oct 2017

We believe, naively, that nobody (but the Big Guy) can listen to our thoughts. But let’s be clear . . . Google too is listening. To date, Google has been masterful at keeping this fear in check and not exploiting—as far as we know—the predictive power of its algorithms. Even the company’s initial motto, “Don’t Be Evil,”attempts to reinforce the divine benevolence of this near-supreme being.19 Moreover, you can be banished: Google has cast out payday lenders, white supremacists, or any firm that charges an interest rate greater than 36 percent. They have been, to recoin a phrase, “cast into outer darkness,” the unknown.

…

Alphabet Inc., Form 10-K for the Period Ending December 31, 2016 (filed January 27, 2017), p. 23, from Alphabet Inc. website. https://abc.xyz/investor/pdf/20161231_alphabet_10K.pdf. 17. Yahoo! Finance. Accessed in February 2016. https://finance.yahoo.com/. 18. Godman, David. “What is Alphabet . . . in 2 minutes.” CNN Money. August 11, 2015. http://money.cnn.com/2015/08/11/technology/alphabet-in-two-minutes/. 19. Basu, Tanya. “New Google Parent Company Drops ‘Don’t Be Evil’ Motto.” Time. October 4, 2015. http://time.com/4060575/alphabet-google-dont-be-evil/. 20. http://www.internetlivestats.com/google-search-statistics/. 21. Sullivan, Danny. “Google now handles at least 2 trillion searches per year.” Search Engine Land. May 24, 2016. http://searchengineland.com/google-now-handles-2-999-trillion-searches-per-year-250247. 22.

The People's Platform: Taking Back Power and Culture in the Digital Age
by Astra Taylor
Published 4 Mar 2014

There have been revelations about the existence of a sprawling international surveillance infrastructure, uncompetitive business and exploitative labor practices, and shady political lobbying initiatives, all of which have made major technology firms the subjects of increasing scrutiny from academics, commentators, activists, and even government officials in the United States and abroad.3 People are beginning to recognize that Silicon Valley platitudes about “changing the world” and maxims like “don’t be evil” are not enough to ensure that some of the biggest corporations on Earth will behave well. The risk, however, is that we will respond to troubling disclosures and other disappointments with cynicism and resignation when what we need is clearheaded and rigorous inquiry into the obstacles that have stalled some of the positive changes the Internet was supposed to usher in.

…

Though they pay lip service to privacy, new-media companies are resistant to any supervision or legal limits on how data are gathered or used, for the simple reason that their profit margins depend on accessing that information. The erosion of privacy online is not an inevitability but rather the result of bad public policy and business incentives that have turned the rush to gather more personal data into a veritable arms race.24 Despite its famous maxim “Don’t Be Evil”—a motto made in reference to specific advertising methods—Google has violated its own principles on more than one occasion. The search giant that once resisted advertising now owns AdMob, AdSense, Analytics, and DoubleClick. Similarly, techniques it once found suspect, such as tracking, have been reconsidered.

Lurking: How a Person Became a User
by Joanne McNeil
Published 25 Feb 2020

Only rare glimpses, like the reflection of a car in a mirrored skyscraper, remind the user that you are observing another person’s experience. * * * A user of Google products might be put off by its chipperness, sympathize with the colored-badge underclass, and believe that its old byword, “Don’t Be Evil,” was always bunk; but the company’s steady dominance over internet infrastructure leaves skeptics with few alternatives. In this bind, Google releases its boggling new ventures. Users, at its launch, complained about ads in Gmail—it’s creepy and feels like a robot is reading my email!—and Google Street View appeared, at first, as an obvious invasion of privacy, not to mention an act of hubris with an undercurrent of colonization.

…

It connected everyone and democratized the world, people met their spouses and had kids because of it, they kept up with friends halfway across the world with it, they found community there. There were “meaningful communities” for Facebook users, like private support groups for people with rare diseases (never mind that one of its many privacy dustups involved a loophole for marketers to harvest names of users in private patient communities). “Don’t be evil” was always bunk, but at least Google’s old watchword boasted about its tolerance for dissent. Facebook’s company culture was an ouroboros, posing that its virtue rested simply in being. Evil, to Facebook, festered in the absence of Facebook. All this time Zuckerberg was practicing rhetorical usury of his users, for with every rare-disease support group coming together in empathetic harmony, there were white supremacists and actual genocide enablers, uniting and forging their own “communities.”

Outnumbered: From Facebook and Google to Fake News and Filter-Bubbles – the Algorithms That Control Our Lives
by David Sumpter
Published 18 Jun 2018

Kenneth Arrow’s ‘impossibility theorem’ tells us there is no system for choosing between three political candidates under which all voters’ preferences are fairly represented.13 Peyton Young’s book Equity, which uses mathematical game theory to treat the subject matter, is by the author’s own admission ‘a stock of examples that illustrate why equity cannot be reduced to simple, all-embracing solutions’.14 And Cynthia Dwork and her colleagues’ 2012 work ‘Fairness through Awareness’, resorts to looking at how we can best balance affirmative action for groups with fairness to the individual.15 Like in Jon Kleinberg and his colleagues’ work on bias, when these authors did the maths they found paradoxes instead of rational certainty. I thought back to the motto, once so proudly stated by Googlers: ‘Don’t be evil.’ It isn’t used as frequently at the company now. Had Google abandoned its axiom after one of its mathematicians discovered that there was no equation that could allow them to avoid evil with certainty? We can try our best, but we can never be truly sure whether or not we are doing the right thing.

…

Candid here, here Fair Housing Act (US) here fairness here fake news here, here, here feedback loops here MacronLeaks here post-truth world here, here, here false negatives here, here false positives here, here, here, here Fark here Feedly here Feller, Avi here Fergus, Rob here Ferrara, Emilio here filter bubbles here, here, here FiveThirtyEight here, here, here, here Flipboard here Flynn, Michael here football here, here robot players here, here Fortunato, Santo here, here Fowler, James here Franks, Nigel here Frostbite here Future of Life Institute here, here Gates, Bill here Gelade, Garry here gender bias here, here, here GloVe (global vectors for word representation) here Genter, Katie here Gentzkow, Matthew here, here Geoengineering Watch here, here Glance, Natalie here GloVe (global vectors for word representation) here Go here, here, here, here Goel, Sharad here Google here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here artificial intelligence (AI) here, here, here black hats here, here, here DeepMind here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here ‘Don’t be evil’ here Google autocomplete here, here Google News here Google Scholar here, here, here, here Google Search here Google+ here personalised adverts here, here, here, here SharedCount here Gore, Al here Grammatas, Angela here, here Guardian here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here Guardian US here, here h-index here, here Häggström, Olle here, here, here Here Be Dragons here Hassabis, Demis here, here, here Hawking, Stephen here, here, here He, Kaiming here Her here Higginson, Andrew here Hinton, Geoffrey here HotUKDeal here Huckfeldt, Bob here, here, here, here Huffington Post here, here, here Independent here Instagram here Internet here, here, here, here Internet service providers (ISPs) here Intrade here Ishiguro, Kazuo Never Let Me Go here iTunes here, here James Webb Sapce Telescope here Jie, Ke here job matching here Johansson, Joakim here, here Journal of Spatial Science here Kaminski, Juliane here Kasparov, Garry here, here Keith, David here Kerry, John here Keuschnigg, Marc here Kleinberg, Jon here Kluemper, Donald here Kogan, Alex here, here, here Kosinski, Michal here, here, here, here, here, here, here Kramer, Adam here, here Krizhevsky, Alex here Kulsrestha, Juhi here Kurzweil, Ray here Labour Party here, here Momentum here Lake, Brenden here language here Laue, Tim here Le Comber, Steve here Le Cun, Yan here Le Pen, Marine here Le, Quoc here Lerman, Kristina here, here, here Levin, Simon here Libratus here LinkedIn here, here, here, here literature here logic gates here Luntz, Frank here Machine Bias here Macron, Emmanuel here Major League Soccer (MLS) here, here Mandela effect here, here Mandela, Nelson here Martin, Erik here matchmaking here mathematics here, here assessing bias here mathematical models here, here, here power laws here Matrix, The here May, Lord Robert here McDonald, Glenn here, here Mechanical Turk here, here, here, here, here Medium here Mercer, Robert here Microsoft here, here, here, here, here, here Mikolov, Tomas here, here Minecraft here Mosseri, Adam here, here, here Mrsic-Flogel, Thomas here Ms Pac-Man here, here, here Munafò, Marcus here Musk, Elon here, here, here myPersonality project here National Health Service (NHS) here, here National Women’s Soccer League (NWSL) here, here Nature here, here, here Natusch, Waffles Pi here Netflix here neural networks here, here convolutional neural networks here limitations here recurrent neural networks here New York Times here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here The Upshot here, here news aggregators here Nix, Alexander here, here, here, here Noiszy here Northpointe here, here, here, here O’Neil, Cathy here Weapons of Math Destruction here Obama, Barack here, here Observer here online data collection here, here gender bias here preventing here principal component analysis (PCA) here online help services here OpenWorm here Overwatch here, here Pasquale, Frank The Black Box Society here, here Paul, Jake here, here, here, here Pennington, Jeffrey here personality analysis here Big Five here, here, here, here PewDiePie here Pierson, Emma here Pittsburgh Post-Gazette here political blogs here political discussions here, here, here PolitiFact here polls here, here, here, here Popular Mechanics here post-truth world here, here, here power laws here Pratt, Stephen here, here PredictIt here, here, here, here, here, here Prince here principal component analysis (PCA) here categorising personalities here COMPAS algorithm here probability distributions here ProPublica here, here, here, here, here, here Pundit here Q*bert 214, here Qualtrics here racial bias here, here, here, here, here GloVe (global vectors for word representation) here randomness here Reddit here, here, here, here, here regression models here, here Republican Party here, here, here, here, here RiceGum here, here Richardson, Kathleen here Road Runner here Robotank here, here robots here, here, here, here, here, here Russian interference here, here, here Salganik, Matthew here, here Sanders, Bernie here Scholz, Monika here Science here SCL here, here search histories here Silver, David here Silver, Nate here, here, here The Signal and the Noise here Silverman, Craig here Simonyan, Karen here singularity hypothesis here Skeem, Jen here Sky Sports here slime moulds (Physarum polycephulum) here, here, here Snapchat here Snopes here social feedback here Space Invaders here, here, here, here Spotify here, here, here, here, here, here, here Stack Exchange here StarCraft here statistics here, here, here, here, here regression models here, here Stillwell, David here, here Sullivan, Andrew here, here Sumpter, David Soccermatics here, here, here, here, here, here, here Sun, The here superforecasters here, here superintelligence here, here Szorkovszky, Alex here, here, here, here, here, here Taleb, Nassim here, here, here Tegmark, Max here, here, here, here Telegraph here, here, here, here Tesla here, here, here, here Tetlock, Philip here, here Texas, Virgil here, here, here The Gateway here TIDAL here Times, The here, here Tinder here, here, here Tolstoy, Leo here, here, here Anna Karenina here trolls here true positives here, here Trump, Donald here, here, here, here, here, here election campaign here, here, here, here, here, here election outcome here, here, here Twitter here, here TUI here, here Turing, Alan here Twitter here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here MacronLeaks here Tyson, Gareth here van Seijen, Harm here, here Vinyals, Oriol here vloggers here voter analysis here, here, here Wall Street Journal here Ward, Ashley here Washington Post here, here, here, here Watts, Duncan here, here Which?

Your Computer Is on Fire
by Thomas S. Mullaney , Benjamin Peters , Mar Hicks and Kavita Philip
Published 9 Mar 2021

Google, especially after the advent of street view and Gmail, provoked major concerns about the centralization of so many citizens’ information in the hands of a private corporation, as well as concerns about how it was casually undoing expectations that many people had about the privacy of their personal information. Google’s efforts to index and make visible the entirety of the web were presented as neutral and helpful, but at the same time the company’s goal was to monetize all of that information, and our searches through it, for ad sales. Google’s now-discarded original motto “Don’t be evil” perhaps seems, in retrospect, to hint at a deeper understanding on the part of its founders that what the company was doing could go badly off the rails without proper oversight. Lastly, Facebook’s roots in sexism and ongoing privacy violations are at this point well known. We understand now that it had a business model that seemingly had harm built into it at the ground level, even if a now-older Zuckerberg has tried to rewrite history and sanitize the story of Facebook’s origins and his corporate strategy.6 In some ways the stories above are unsurprising, and fit a pattern: the entire history of electronic computing is, as is the case with many technologies, intertwined with efforts at domination.

…

It is hard enough to dislodge and correct such broken systems when we do have a say—a legally protected vote—in how they should function. It is exponentially harder when the very basis on which the system operates means we do not. After getting pushback from their own employees on the company’s ethical failures, post-“don’t be evil” Google management appointed a problematic “AI ethics board” without giving employees a voice. Employee pushback got the board disbanded, but the company now has no AI ethics board, nor is it required to have one.15 Labor unrest and consumer complaints can only pressure corporations into better behavior when governments enforce laws and regulations meant to protect our lives instead of the companies’ bottom lines.

…

See also Gender inequality anti-, 144 Ferraiolo, Angela, 235 Fibonacci sequence, 275–277 Fido, Bulletin Board System, 322–324 FidoNet, 322–326, 327, 333 demise, 326 nodes, 322–324 zonemail, 322 Fire crisis, 6, 22–24, 159 crowded theatre, 363, 373 flames, 267, 368 gaming, 233, 242, 245 infrastructures, 313–333 passim, 322 optimism, 309 physical, 5, 44, 321 pyrocene, 364 spread, 6–7 and technologies, relationship to, 13, 111, 313 Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, 22 typography, 213, 227 your computer is on, 4, 232 First Round, 265 Fiber optic link around the globe (FLAG), 101 FLAG, 101 Flanagan, Mary, 235 Flickering signifier, 284 Flores, Fernando, 79 Flowers, Tommy, 143 Forecasting, 6, 57, 110 FOSS (Free and open-source software), 191 414 gang, 287–288 Fowler, Susan, 254 France (French), 39, 117, 145, 216, 219, 221, 320 French (language), 341, 344, 380 Free and open-source software, 191 Free speech, 59, 61–62, 373–374 Friedman, Thomas, 308 Friendster, 17, 313 Future Ace, 299 Games big game companies, 245–246 computer, 232–233 limits of, 232–233, 243, 244–245 rhetoric vs. reality, 232 skinning, 233–236 video, 241, 246 Garbage In, Garbage Out (GIGO), 58 Gates, Bill, 18, 29 Gem Future Academy, 299 Gender inequality, 4–6, 8, 21, 136, 184, 187, 381 artificial intelligence, 121, 127–128 British civil service, 140, 144–145, 148, 150–152 hiring gaps, 253–257, 259–260, 267, 367 and IBM, 159–175 passim internet’s structural, 97, 99, 102, 109–110 and robotics, 199–204 stereotyping, 106 technical design, 370 of work, 302–303, 307–309, 367, 375 Gender Resource Center, 298 Gendered Innovations initiative, 200 Germany, 221, 290, 341 IBM and West, 160–161, 166–175 Nazi, 15, 63, 143 Gerritsen, Tim, 238 Ghana, 45, 149f, 330 Gilded Age, 13, 32 Glass ceiling, 136, 143 Global North, 191, 324–325 Global South, 91–92, 94, 309, 325, 333, 367 Global System for Mobile (GSM) Communications network, 327–328 Global Voices, 331 Glushkov, Viktor M., 77–78, 83 Google, 5, 7, 84, 87, 160, 201, 254, 263, 318, 321, 329, 333 advertising, 136–137 Alphabet, 31, 54 AlphaGo, 7 business concerns, 17 Docs, 224 Drive, 224 employees, 23, 207, 262 ethics board, 22 hiring, 257 Home, 179, 180, 184, 189, 190t image recognition, 4, 120 original motto, (“don’t be evil”), 17, 22 Photos, 265 search, 66, 203, 328 voice recognition, 188 Graham, Paul, 256 Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas, 245 GRC (Gender Resource Center), 298 Great book tourism, 366–367, 374 GreenNet (UK), 324–325 Grubhub, 210 Global System for Mobile Communications (GSM) network, 327–328 GSM (Global System for Mobile Communications) network, 327–328 G-Tech Foundation, 298, 301 Guest, Arthur, 217 Hacking, 15, 81, 87, 256, 266, 287, 291 hacker, 263–264, 266, 287, 291 tourist, 100–102 Haddad, Selim, 216–218, 220 Hangul, 7, 341–344, 351 Hanscom Air Force Base Electronic Systems Division, 274 Harvard University, 14, 257, 349 Hashing, 57, 66, 124–126, 129 #DREAMerHack, 266 #YesWeCode, 253, 264–266 Hayes, Patrick, 52 Haymarket riots, 168 Health insurance, 53 Hebrew, 217, 222, 224–225, 341, 343–344, 354 Henderson, Amy, 265 Heretic, 237 Heterarchy, 86t, 87 Heteronormative, 139, 154 Hewlett-Packard, 318 High tech, 12–13, 21, 35, 37, 46, 147–148 sexism in, 136–138, 152–153 High-level languages (HLL), 275, 277–278, 284, 290 Hindi, 190, 215, 342, 355f Hiring.

Driverless Cars: On a Road to Nowhere
by Christian Wolmar
Published 18 Jan 2018

And so it is with the tech companies today: Silicon Valley has used many of the same gambits. You only have to spend a few minutes listening to tech pioneers such as the founders of Facebook or Airbnb to hear how their Driverless Cars: On a Road to Nowhere ‘disruptive’ companies are going to create a more inclusive and happier world. ‘Don’t be evil’, Google used to say; that has now been changed to ‘Do the right thing’. Silicon Valley built its very reputation on harnessing technology to make us happier, more fulfilled and more satisfied human beings. Technology, they argue, is the catalyst for a better life – and incidentally, don’t get in our way as we are creating that better life, or put any constraints on our growth.

The Big Nine: How the Tech Titans and Their Thinking Machines Could Warp Humanity
by Amy Webb
Published 5 Mar 2019

The absence of certain stated values is notable, too, because out of the spotlight, they become hard to see and are easily forgotten. Originally, Google operated under a simple, core value: “Don’t be evil.”1 In their 2004 IPO letter, founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page wrote: “Eric [Schmidt], Sergey and I intend to operate Google differently, applying the values it has developed as a private company to its future as a public company.… We will optimize for the long term rather than trying to produce smooth earnings for each quarter. We will support selected high-risk, high-reward projects and manage our portfolio of projects.… We will live up to our ‘don’t be evil’ principle by keeping user trust.”2 Amazon’s “leadership principles” are entrenched within management structure, and the core of those values center around trust, metrics, speed, frugality, and results.

The Road to Conscious Machines
by Michael Wooldridge
Published 2 Nov 2018

There would be no deep reasoning involved – if there was any reasoning at all, it would probably be no more sophisticated than if you are faced with multiple obstacles then avoid the larger of these – but, frankly, even this level of reasoning seems implausible. The likeliest outcome would be that the car would just slam on the brakes. And perhaps, in practice, that is probably all that we would manage to do, in the same situation. The Rise of Ethical AI ‘Don’t be evil.’ –– Google company motto, 2000–2015 (approximately) Of course, there are much wider issues around AI and ethics, which are perhaps of more immediate importance and relevance than the arguably rather artificial Trolley Problem, and at the time of writing, these issues are being keenly debated.

…

It is, of course, wonderful that big businesses are declaring their commitment to ethical AI. The difficulty, though, is their truly understanding precisely what they have committed to. High-level aspirations, such as sharing the benefits of AI, are welcome, but translating that into specific actions is not easy. The company motto used by Google for more than a decade was ‘Don’t be evil’. That sounds great – and I daresay was genuinely well intentioned – but what, precisely, does that mean for Google’s employees? They will need much more specific guidance if they are to prevent Google from crossing over to the Dark Side. Within the various frameworks that have been proposed, certain themes recur, and there is increasing consensus around these.

Founders at Work: Stories of Startups' Early Days
by Jessica Livingston
Published 14 Aug 2008

He was the creator and lead developer of Gmail, Google’s web-based email system, which anticipated most aspects of what is now called Web 2.0. As part of his work on Gmail, Buchheit developed the first prototype of AdSense, Google’s program for running ads on other websites. He also suggested the company’s now-famous motto, “Don’t be evil,” at a 2000 meeting on company values. Although not a founder, Buchheit probably contributed more to Google than many founders do their startups. Gmail was in effect a startup within Google—a dramatically novel project on the margins of the company, initiated by a small group and brought to fruition against a good deal of resistance.

…

Livingston: Did you get any compensation for doing this project that was such a big success within the company? Buchheit: It’s hard for me to know even, because, even after the initial stock grants, throughout the history of the company they’ve given follow-on grants. So I don’t know what mine would have been if I wasn’t working on Gmail. Livingston: I heard you came up with the famous “Don’t be evil” principle. Can you give me the background? Buchheit: I believe that it was sometime in early 2000, and there was a meeting to decide on the company’s values. They invited a collection of people who had 170 Founders at Work been there for a while. I had just come from Intel, so the whole thing with corporate values seemed a little bit funny to me.

…

I had just come from Intel, so the whole thing with corporate values seemed a little bit funny to me. I was sitting there trying to think of something that would be really different and not one of these usual “strive for excellence” type of statements. I also wanted something that, once you put it in there, would be hard to take out. It just sort of occurred to me that “Don’t be evil” is kind of funny. It’s also a bit of a jab at a lot of the other companies, especially our competitors, who at the time, in our opinion, were kind of exploiting the users to some extent. They were tricking them selling search results—which we considered a questionable thing to do because people didn’t realize that they were ads.

The Idealist: Aaron Swartz and the Rise of Free Culture on the Internet
by Justin Peters
Published 11 Feb 2013

But some malign entity had altered the code to show users the stories of the entity’s choosing.66 That malign entity turned out to be Google, which specialized in projects that appeared to be for the public’s benefit, in keeping with its unofficial corporate motto: “Don’t be evil.” In Bubble City, Swartz opined on this hollow-hearted promise. “Don’t Be Evil was some hacker’s PR ploy that got out of hand,” Swartz wrote. “Paul Buchheit, the guy who made Gmail, suggested it in an early meeting and Amit Patel, another early Googler starting [sic] writing it on whiteboards everywhere. A journalist saw it and the rest was history—but don’t be mistaken, it was never official corporate policy.”67 How could it be?

Woke, Inc: Inside Corporate America's Social Justice Scam
by Vivek Ramaswamy
Published 16 Aug 2021

That’s the key difference between stakeholder and shareholder capitalism: if corporations never gained unearned moral authority to begin with, they couldn’t be weaponized so easily by authoritarian stakeholders. THE CCP IS the spider at the center of the global web of stakeholder capitalism. This theoretical observation is borne out by the actions of American companies abroad. For instance, when Google first drafted its code of conduct for employees in 2000, it famously included the line “don’t be evil.”31 Google seems to have quickly forgotten that rule when it went abroad to do business in China. Its initial Chinese search engine enabled censorship by state authorities from 2006 to 2010, but after being the victim of Chinese hacking efforts, Google eventually announced that it would no longer comply with mainland Chinese censorship and relocated to Hong Kong.32 Upon leaving mainland China, Google tried to make a virtue of necessity, with Sergei Brin speaking out against the “forces of totalitarianism.”33 That lip service to freedom of speech earned Google applause in the West, but the truth is that the company quickly sought to return to China by any means necessary.

…

Blinken, National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan, Director Yang and State Councilor Wang at the Top of Their Meeting.” U.S. Department of State, 23 Mar. 2021, www.state.gov/secretary-antony-j-blinken-national-security-advisor-jake-sullivan-chinese-director-of-the-office-of-the-central-commission-for-foreign-affairs-yang-jiechi-and-chinese-state-councilor-wang-yi-at-th/. 31. Conger, Kate. “Google Removes ‘Don’t Be Evil’ Clause from Its Code of Conduct.” Gizmodo, 18 May 2018, gizmodo.com/google-removes-nearly-all-mentions-of-dont-be-evil-from-1826153393. 32. Helft, Miguel, and David Barboza. “Google Shuts China Site in Dispute over Censorship.” The New York Times, 22 Mar. 2010, www.nytimes.com/2010/03/23/technology/23google.html. 33.

Valley of Genius: The Uncensored History of Silicon Valley (As Told by the Hackers, Founders, and Freaks Who Made It Boom)
by Adam Fisher
Published 9 Jul 2018

I was sitting there trying to think of something that would be really different and not one of these usual “strive for excellence” sort of statements. I also wanted something that, once you get it in there, would be hard to take out. Brad Templeton: “Don’t be evil” was the phrase. Paul Buchheit: It just sort occurred to me. Sergey Brin: We have tried to define precisely what it means to be a force for good—always do the right, ethical thing. Ultimately, “Don’t be evil” seems the easiest way to summarize it. Paul Buchheit: It’s also a bit of a jab at the other companies, especially our competitors, who at the time were, in our opinion, kind of exploiting the users to some extent.

…

Po Bronson wrote a novel about the financial markets and then another about start-ups before he turned to nonfiction. It was the perfect windup for his subject: the great internet gold rush of the late nineties. The Nudist on the Late Shift is still, in this writer’s informed opinion, the best book ever written about that era. Paul Buchheit was a very early Google employee. He coined the phrase “Don’t Be Evil,” which became Google’s corporate motto. He built the AdSense prototype—the software that, even to this day, generates much of Google’s corporate wealth. For an encore he hacked together a little experiment that he called Gmail. Nolan Bushnell founded Atari, the company that started the computer game industry and put Silicon Valley on its modern path.

This Is How They Tell Me the World Ends: The Cyberweapons Arms Race
by Nicole Perlroth
Published 9 Feb 2021

But he also began to take the assault personally. Brin’s identity—and, one could argue, Google’s corporate identity too—was inextricably linked with his family’s escape from the Soviet Union in the late 1970s. He saw the attack as a direct assault on the founding principles of Google itself, summed up by its three-word motto: “Don’t be evil.” With each visit to the war room, Brin was further convinced that this was not the work of some basement dweller; this was a well-resourced attack. Baked inside that three-word clickbait, “Go Kill Yourself,” was a link to a website hosted in Taiwan that executed a script containing a zero-day exploit in Microsoft’s Internet Explorer browser.

…

Google’s presence in China didn’t play well in Washington either. Brin and Page were likened to Nazi collaborators. Members of the House International Relations Committee compared Google to a “functionary of the Chinese government” and called its actions “abhorrent.” “Google has seriously compromised its ‘Don’t Be Evil’ policy,” one Republican congressman said. “Indeed, it has become evil’s accomplice.” Some executives began to feel that way. But they knew that anything less than full compliance with Chinese authorities was dangerous. They’d all heard the stories. Chinese agents frequently raided corporate offices to threaten local executives with jail time if they didn’t move quickly to block “problematic” content.

…

Now Brin was among the world’s most successful entrepreneurs, and richest men. He was not about to roll over to another authoritarian regime now. Neither was every sleepless soul in Google’s war room that January 2010. They’d come to work at Google for the free perks, free food, free classes, free gyms, and “Don’t be evil” ethos. Its more recent recruits had come to join the fight. Nobody standing there that January was going to stay on if they thought their work was somehow abetting Chinese surveillance, jailings, and torture. “Our entire attitude changed,” Eric Schmidt, Google’s CEO told me. “We weren’t going to let it happen again.

Digital Wars: Apple, Google, Microsoft and the Battle for the Internet
by Charles Arthur
Published 3 Mar 2012

With Microsoft suitably admonished, and now living under a new regime of oversight, the scene was set for Microsoft’s next challenges: in search, digital music and mobile phones. First was a little start-up that was already becoming the talk of internet users, one that was to form its corporate thinking around a motto that tried to express a desire not to be Microsoft: ‘Don’t be evil.’ Chapter Three Search: Google versus Microsoft The weather in Brisbane for the 7th World Wide Web conference in May 1998 was dismal: ‘It rained every day,’ recalls Mike Bracken, one of the attendees. Among the many papers on the schedule for the conference, though largely unnoticed, was one by two Stanford undergraduates, entitled ‘The anatomy of a large-scale hypertextual web search engine’.

…

Schmidt, while less adamant, said that it was unreasonable to miss out on the opportunity; without Google, the search business in China would still grow, and local rivals would get the chance to dominate and leave Google trying to catch up. Page, in effect holding the casting vote, sided with Schmidt. Google began offering a search engine sited inside China in January 2006 at google.cn. Already known for the ‘Don’t be evil’ slogan, Google came under intense scrutiny over its decision. ‘We felt that perhaps we could compromise our principles, but provide ultimately more information for the Chinese… and perhaps make more of a difference,’ Brin suggested in a press conference afterwards. But Irene Khan, then Amnesty International’s secretary-general, was unimpressed: ‘Whether succumbing to demands from Chinese officials or anticipating government concerns, companies that impose restrictions that infringe on human rights are being extremely short-sighted,’ she said, adding: ‘Internet companies justify their actions on the basis of Chinese regulations.

The Great Firewall of China
by James Griffiths;
Published 15 Jan 2018

“While the internet has opened up commercial opportunities and provided access to vast amounts of information for people the world over, [it] has also become a malicious tool, a cyber-sledgehammer of repression of the government of the People’s Republic of China,” said Chris Smith, a large, square-jawed Republican congressman with intense blue eyes and thin-rimmed reading glasses, as he leaned forward in his seat.1 “As soon as the promise of the internet began to be fulfilled, when brave Chinese [users] began to email each other around the world about human rights issues and corruption by government leaders, the Party cracked down.” Of the four companies arrayed before Smith, Google had faced the most criticism from the US media, thanks to both its fame and the company’s well-known, and often mocked, ‘Don’t be evil’ slogan. Of the four, however, Google’s time operating in China was the shortest, and its conscience was the cleanest. Google was accused of collaborating with the creators of the Great Firewall, but Cisco had helped build it. In 2004, Yahoo provided user records that helped lead to the arrest of journalist Shi Tao, who was later sentenced to ten years in prison.2 The following year, Microsoft had deleted the blog of dissident author Michael Anti after the authorities complained, censoring him not only in China but around the world.3 This sparked instant outrage and criticism, but a Microsoft spokesperson defended the move on the grounds that it was the cost of doing business in China: “While this is a complex and difficult issue, we remain convinced it is better for Microsoft and other multinational companies to be in these markets with our services and communications tools, as opposed to not being there.”

…

Facebook has censored LGBTQ people, Black Lives Matter activists, and breastfeeding mothers.16 YouTube has long been accused of overzealously enforcing copyright, taking down legitimate parodies or videos that fall under ‘fair use’ protections.17 There are already worrying signs that the fallout from the great fake news panic of 2016 will be the increased censorship and marginalisation of minority voices, particularly those on the political fringes, as platforms such as Facebook and Google attempt to litigate which sites constitute a legitimate news source.18 As this book went to print, news emerged that Google had been developing a secret app for the Chinese market, codenamed Dragonfly.19 According to journalist Ryan Gallagher, who broke the story, the Android search tool would automatically identify and filter websites blocked by the Great Firewall, and it had been demonstrated to officials within the Chinese government. Dragonfly’s existence was a closely guarded secret, even within Google itself, and Gallagher’s reporting sparked outrage among employees, some of whom saw it as the final betrayal of Google’s ‘don’t be evil’ ethos. In an open letter to their bosses, hundreds of Googlers complained of a lack of transparency within the company and warned that Dragonfly and a return to China “raise urgent moral and ethical issues” that were not being addressed.20 Those who had lived through the original China experiment were less than impressed.

Surviving AI: The Promise and Peril of Artificial Intelligence
by Calum Chace
Published 28 Jul 2015

Even the ruthless “robber barons” of the early 20th century who made huge fortunes from railroads, commodities and power used their money to establish major benevolent institutions. Andrew Carnegie pursued wealth aggressively in his early years and spent the last third of his life giving it all away, establishing a pattern followed and advocated by Bill Gates today. But the Google founders’ excitement about the future is something new. Their famous motto “Don’t be evil” is just the start of it. They want to accelerate the progress of technological innovation to transform what it means to be human. Some people are cynical about this, believing that they are simply covering up their corporate greed in philanthropic clothing. I have no privileged information, but I disagree: my sense is that their enthusiasm for the future is genuine.

Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future
by Peter Thiel and Blake Masters
Published 15 Sep 2014

Michelin maintained his rating, but Loiseau killed himself anyway in 2003 when a competing French dining guide downgraded his restaurant.) The competitive ecosystem pushes people toward ruthlessness or death. A monopoly like Google is different. Since it doesn’t have to worry about competing with anyone, it has wider latitude to care about its workers, its products, and its impact on the wider world. Google’s motto—“Don’t be evil”—is in part a branding ploy, but it’s also characteristic of a kind of business that’s successful enough to take ethics seriously without jeopardizing its own existence. In business, money is either an important thing or it is everything. Monopolists can afford to think about things other than making money; non-monopolists can’t.

Samsung Rising: The Inside Story of the South Korean Giant That Set Out to Beat Apple and Conquer Tech
by Geoffrey Cain
Published 15 Mar 2020

Shin, chief executive officer of Samsung Mobile Communications, at the Wynn hotel on the Vegas strip, at Google’s offices in Mountain View, Calif., and again in February at the Mobile World Congress convention in Barcelona,” Bloomberg Businessweek’s Brad Stone reported. “Pichai says they held ‘frank conversations’ about the companies’ intertwined fates.” “I view Tizen as a choice which people can have,” Pichai told Stone. “We need to make sure Android is the better choice.” Google was known for the idealistic spirit embodied in its slogan “Don’t be evil.” But this was a new kind of fight. Pichai told Shin that Google was willing to “walk away” from its Samsung partnership. It was a bold statement; nearly three years earlier, Google had acquired Motorola for $12.5 billion, putting it into direct competition with Samsung and its smartphone hardware.

…

Then there was the return to the Google search app, which one contract stipulated was required to be “set as the default search provider for all Web search access points on the Device.” And Google’s search widget now had to be placed on the default home screen, along with an icon for the Google Play app store. Behind the scenes, some Samsung executives thought the company that had once heralded the age of “Don’t be evil” was becoming a bully. One app maker felt Google’s move to bundle its software was “reminiscent of the monopolistic heyday of Microsoft,” Recode reported. Samsung was being forced to rethink their software efforts, which were now in conflict with their previously indispensable partner. D.J.

Liars and Outliers: How Security Holds Society Together
by Bruce Schneier
Published 14 Feb 2012

They want to survive, just like individuals. Ego-preserving interest. Organizations have an analogue of self-image, and do things to preserve that image. For example, some organizations have a mission statement and go to great lengths to make sure their actions are consistent with their words. (Google's “don't be evil” motto is a good example.) Some organizations have particular reputations they want to preserve, for being honorable, ruthless, quick, and so on. Other organizations take pride in their geographic origins or in how long they've been in business. Still others have charitable foundations. Other psychological motivations.

…

Even though organizations have interests, the societal pressures we've already talked about work differently on organizations than they do on people. Moral pressure. Organizations are not people; they don't have brains, and they don't have morals. They can have group interests that are analogous to morals, though. Charities can have lofty mission statements, and a corporate mission statement like “don't be evil” is effectively a moral. Reputational pressure. For groups, reputation works differently than for individuals. Organizations care about their reputation just as individuals do: possibly more, due to size. They also have more control over it. Organizations can spend money to repair their reputations by undertaking advertising and public relations campaigns, making over their images, and so on—options that are simply unavailable to most individuals.

Hacking Politics: How Geeks, Progressives, the Tea Party, Gamers, Anarchists and Suits Teamed Up to Defeat SOPA and Save the Internet
by David Moon , Patrick Ruffini , David Segal , Aaron Swartz , Lawrence Lessig , Cory Doctorow , Zoe Lofgren , Jamie Laurie , Ron Paul , Mike Masnick , Kim Dotcom , Tiffiniy Cheng , Alexis Ohanian , Nicole Powers and Josh Levy
Published 30 Apr 2013

Let’s be clear about this third level of influence, then. It was a remarkable tactic, and demonstrates that the big companies in the digital environment are beginning to recognize that they have to push back against the big companies from the traditional entertainment environment. But that’s a pretty meek revolution. Google is still a corporation, “Don’t Be Evil” motto notwithstanding (Vaidhyanathan 2011). If the digital companies start expending more resources pressuring Congress, that will provide a more pluralistic balance in the MPAA’s policy playground, but it doesn’t necessarily put power in the hands of the “Internet public.” The fight over Internet censorship is far from over.

…

It’s possible that major tech firms will get a seat at the table in the next round of negotiations. It is possible to craft an Internet piracy bill that serves the interests of Google and the interests of Hollywood without serving the interests of smaller content creation sites. We would do well to recall the Net Neutrality compromise that Google made in the summer of 2010. Sometimes “Don’t Be Evil” is just a motto. The problem here is that, without Google, the third level of influence is much reduced. Google occupies a unique space in the geography of the Internet. 3. Most hopefully, it is possible that the SOPA blackout will allow a new public—what David Parry calls “the Internet Public” (Parry 2011) to take root.

The Contrarian: Peter Thiel and Silicon Valley's Pursuit of Power
by Max Chafkin
Published 14 Sep 2021

* * * — the campaign intensified after he’d left the Trump White House in 2017 and it began the way many of Thiel’s companies and political projects had begun since his college days: with a culture war. Google was, not unlike Stanford, full of lefty idealists devoted to the company’s lofty mission—“To organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful”—and its vaguely progressive-sounding politics that promised “don’t be evil.” But Google also had a conservative contingent—young college graduates who’d been attracted to the growing company because it paid well, offered great job security, and had the reputation for hiring elite engineers. Many of them were well versed in the blend of prosperity gospel and libertarian politics of Peter Thiel.

…

posted the same message: Kari Paul, “Tech Workers Protest Data Mining Firm Palantir for Role in Immigrant Arrests,” The Guardian, May 13, 2019, https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2019/may/13/tech-workers-palantir-immigration-protest-github. cut ties with it: Tom McKay, “Dozens Arrested at #JewsAgainstICE Protest at Amazon Store in NYC,” Gizmodo, August 11, 2019, https://gizmodo.com/dozens-arrested-at-jewsagainstice-protest-at-amazon-st-1837156701. The effort, Project Dragonfly: Mark Bergen, “Google in China: When ‘Don’t Be Evil’ Met the Great Firewall,” Bloomberg Businessweek, November 8, 2011, https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2018-11-08/google-never-stopped-trying-to-go-to-china?sref=4ZgkJ7cZ. went on CNBC: “Joe Lonsdale: Google Is Not a Patriotic Company,” Squawk Alley, CNBC, July 15, 2019, https://www.youtube.com/watch?

Steve Jobs
by Walter Isaacson
Published 23 Oct 2011

“They entered the phone business. Make no mistake. They want to kill the iPhone. We won’t let them.” A few minutes later, after the meeting moved on to another topic, Jobs returned to his tirade to attack Google’s famous values slogan. “I want to go back to that other question first and say one more thing. This ‘Don’t be evil’ mantra, it’s bullshit.” Jobs felt personally betrayed. Google’s CEO Eric Schmidt had been on the Apple board during the development of the iPhone and iPad, and Google’s founders, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, had treated him as a mentor. He felt ripped off. Android’s touchscreen interface was adopting more and more of the features—multi-touch, swiping, a grid of app icons—that Apple had created.

…

But he also threatened that if Google continued to develop Android and used any iPhone features, such as multi-touch, he would sue. At first Google avoided copying certain features, but in January 2010 HTC introduced an Android phone that boasted multi-touch and many other aspects of the iPhone’s look and feel. That was the context for Jobs’s pronouncement that Google’s “Don’t be evil” slogan was “bullshit.” So Apple filed suit against HTC (and, by extension, Android), alleging infringement of twenty of its patents. Among them were patents covering various multi-touch gestures, swipe to open, double-tap to zoom, pinch and expand, and the sensors that determined how a device was being held.

…

Ken Auletta, “Publish or Perish,” New Yorker, Apr. 26, 2010; Ryan Tate, “The Price of Crossing Steve Jobs,” Gawker, Sept. 30, 2010. CHAPTER 39: NEW BATTLES Google: Open versus Closed: Interviews with Steve Jobs, Bill Campbell, Eric Schmidt, John Doerr, Tim Cook, Bill Gates. John Abell, “Google’s ‘Don’t Be Evil’ Mantra Is ‘Bullshit,’” Wired, Jan. 30, 2010; Brad Stone and Miguel Helft, “A Battle for the Future Is Getting Personal,” New York Times, March 14, 2010. Flash, the App Store, and Control: Interviews with Steve Jobs, Bill Campbell, Tom Friedman, Art Levinson, Al Gore. Leander Kahney, “What Made Apple Freeze Out Adobe?”

If Then: How Simulmatics Corporation Invented the Future
by Jill Lepore
Published 14 Sep 2020

They built it out of old bits and pieces made by Simulmatics: content analysis, the simulation of human behavior, targeted messages, social networks, IF/THEN statements. Unlike the scientists of Simulmatics, many of the people who built the new machine did not begin with the best of intentions. They boasted that, at best, they had no bad intentions. “Don’t be evil,” the motto of Google, marked the limit of a swaggering, devil-may-care ethical ambition; doing good did not come into it.7 Incubated decades before, beneath a honeycombed, geodesic dome in Wading River, this work found a place, too, in universities. In the 2010s, a flood of money into universities attempted to make the study of data a science, with data science initiatives, data science programs, data science degrees, data science centers.8 Much academic research that fell under the label “data science” produced excellent and invaluable work, across many fields of inquiry, findings that would not have been possible with computational discovery.9 And no field should be judged by its worst practitioners.

…

See, e.g., Aline Holzwarth, “The Three Laws of Human Behavior,” behavioraleconomics.com, May 7, 2019, https://www.behavioraleconomics.com/the-three-laws-of-human-behavior/. Ashlee Vance, “This Tech Bubble Is Different,” Bloomberg Businessweek, April 14, 2011. Although, notably, Google abandoned “Don’t be evil” in 2015, and Alphabet Inc. adopted a code of conduct that urged employees to “do the right thing,” http://blogs.wsj.com/digits/2015/10/02/as-google-becomes-alphabet-dont-be-evil-vanishes/. Mathematicians-turned-businessmen Jeff Hammerbacher and D. J. Patil claim to have coined the term “data scientist” in 2008, and not long after, data science was also embraced both within and outside the academy as a new scientific method, a “fourth paradigm,” following the earlier paradigms of empirical, theoretical, and computational analysis.

Demystifying Smart Cities
by Anders Lisdorf

Ideals are expressed as architecture principles. A good format is the TOGAF formula of Name, Statement, Rationale, and Implications:Name – Should be easy to remember and represent the essence of the rule. Statement – Should clearly and precisely state the rule. It should also be nontrivial (“don’t be evil” does not pass the test). Rationale – Provides a reason for the rule and highlights the benefits of it. Implications – Spells out the real-world consequences of this principle. The first thing to do then is to flesh out these ideals and create a process through which you can create buy-in to them.

What's Yours Is Mine: Against the Sharing Economy
by Tom Slee
Published 18 Nov 2015

Internet culture also believes that the Internet itself is a key to building a better world. The invention of the Internet marks a break with the past, and an opportunity to open many old political and social debates. Companies see themselves as enlightened participants in these debates, with a social mandate as well as a business mandate; Google’s “Don’t be evil” mantra encapsulates their belief that the company has a moral mission as well as a technological one. Internet culture is also supremely ambitious and self-confident. It’s a confidence captured in venture capitalist Marc Andreessen’s saying that “software is eating the world.” In its outer reaches it is an ambition manifested in ideas of Seasteading (a movement to build self-governing floating cities, started by PayPal founder Peter Thiel) and the Singularity (a belief in “the dawning of a new civilization that will enable us to transcend our biological limitations and amplify our creativity,” originating with the ideas of inventor and now Google employee Ray Kurzweil).

World Without Mind: The Existential Threat of Big Tech
by Franklin Foer
Published 31 Aug 2017

Page prided himself on hiring engineers for business-minded jobs that would traditionally go to someone trained in, say, finance. Even as Google came to employ tens of thousands of workers, Larry Page personally reviewed a file on each potential hire to make sure that the company didn’t veer too far from its engineering roots. The best expression of the company’s idealism was its oft-mocked motto, “Don’t be evil.” That slogan becomes easier to understand, and a more potent expression of values, when you learn that Google never intended the phrase for public consumption. The company meant to focus employees on the beneficent, ambitious mission of the company—a Post-it note to the corporate self, reminding Google not to behave as selfishly and narrow-mindedly as Microsoft, the king of tech it intended to dethrone.

The Secret War Between Downloading and Uploading: Tales of the Computer as Culture Machine
by Peter Lunenfeld
Published 31 Mar 2011

Over the past few years, the GNU/Linux open source expanded and became a robust—if still technologically daunting—alternative to the copyrighted, proprietary software of behemoths like Microsoft and Oracle, while the model of collaborative, cooperative development yielded results that could go toe-to-toe with established, for-profit business models. 173 GENERATIONS The Searchers: Larry Page, Sergey Brin, and Others Don’t Be Evil. —Google corporate motto Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. —Arthur C. Clarke Half a century into the computerization of culture, whatever linear narratives of origin we have been able to map out here definitively break down. The bursting of the dot-com bubble was reminiscent of the disastrous fate of railroad companies in the United States in the late nineteenth century.

So You've Been Publicly Shamed
by Jon Ronson
Published 9 Mar 2015

Jonathan’s email said the same thing: ‘Something about this story resonated with them, so much so that they felt compelled to google her name. That means they’re engaged. If interest in Justine were sufficient to encourage users to stay online for more time than they would otherwise, this would have directly resulted in Google making more advertising revenue. Google has the informal corporate motto of “don’t be evil”, but they make money when anything happens online, even the bad stuff.’ In the absence of any better data from Google, he wrote, he could only ever offer a ‘back of the envelope’ calculation. But he thought it would be appropriately conservative - maybe a little too conservative - to estimate Justine’s worth, being a ‘low-value query’, at a quarter of the average.

Built for Growth: How Builder Personality Shapes Your Business, Your Team, and Your Ability to Win
by Chris Kuenne and John Danner
Published 5 Jun 2017

That puts people in a place where they can do their very best work.”8 Not exactly the kind of crew Jobs would have commanded. Google’s Crusaders “Organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful”—it’s hard to imagine a more ambitious initial company mission than that (except perhaps Google’s other one: “Don’t be evil”). But that’s the crusade Google’s cofounders, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, embarked on in 1998. Since then, Google has redefined how we use the web, redesigned concepts of the workplace, and refined its business model—separating its wildly successful advertising business from its “moon shot” initiatives like self-driving cars.

Shipping Greatness
by Chris Vander Mey
Published 23 Aug 2012

Have your team review the log data, or at least understand the systems that are generating the reports, whether those are Webtrends or Google Analytics. Defensive Acquisitions I have not led a defensive deal. In my opinion, they’re not very nice and smell of fear-based decision making. If you have the pockets to do a defensive deal, please don’t be evil when you do one. If you’re even considering doing a defensive deal, you probably need to think about what monopolistic practices are. “I’m not a lawyer” is the first thing you should get used to saying because at least your comments will be in context. I’m not a lawyer, so I won’t tell you what not to do.

How to Run the World: Charting a Course to the Next Renaissance
by Parag Khanna
Published 11 Jan 2011

For example, when China demanded that foreign PCs come preinstalled with software that would allow censors to block selected sites, the public outcry shamed the government to scale back its request, instead asking only to make the software optional. What if China tried to force ICANN to deregister certain domain names it had trouble blocking, and ICANN instead threatened to delist official Chinese servers? Eventually, the Chinese authorities may respect and even follow Google’s unofficial motto: “Don’t Be Evil.” Human-Rights.org If global justice has a voice, its name is, appropriately, Avaaz, the word in many Asian languages for “voice.” Avaaz is one of the largest online communities with more than three million members. Spearheaded by a lean team of social networkers, it has no use for national chapters, dividing its operations not by geography but by language—currently thirteen of them (to the United Nations’ six).

The Smartphone Society
by Nicole Aschoff

They told stories about moon shots, abundance, and living on Mars, and in the midst of the Great Pessimism we were enraptured. NYU marketing professor, Scott Galloway, says of the iPhone: it “was a bright light in the darkness that signaled hope and optimism.”11 It had suddenly become acceptable to think big again. Larry Page, whose company’s unofficial slogan is “Don’t be evil,” talks about using knowledge to fix things and help people. “In every story I read about Google, it’s about us versus some other company or some stupid thing,” he laments. “I don’t find that very interesting. We should be building great things that don’t exist. Being negative is not how we make progress.”12 Airbnb cofounder Brian Chesky speaks of the company’s “pure” mission to “solve a problem and to help people.”13 Yelp gives its employees teddy bears for being nice.

The System: Who Owns the Internet, and How It Owns Us
by James Ball
Published 19 Aug 2020

A new order would surely emerge. Even when business came to the internet world, it was going to be different. The reach and scale of the internet would enable a ‘long tail’ of small and independent producers to flourish. Online companies were launched talking in earnest terms of changing the world, with ‘don’t be evil’ mantras alongside – and generous share options making even their office decorators rich. For a long time, you could convince yourself it was all the real deal. At the start of the last decade, WikiLeaks used its unique online platform to challenge the world’s biggest superpower with an unprecedented series of leaks.

How Boards Work: And How They Can Work Better in a Chaotic World
by Dambisa Moyo
Published 3 May 2021

For example, company leaders could publicly commend an employee or team for exemplary behavior, signaling to the broader workforce the sorts of values they want employees to emulate. Corporations regularly try to rally employees around a common narrative and appeal to reason. It is not uncommon for companies to adapt easily memorable slogans to drive home the cultural imperative to its employees. Some better-known examples include Google’s “Don’t be evil,” Apple’s “Think different,” and BP’s rebranding as Beyond Petroleum. By and large, even in cases where management has taken the lead on the culture message, boards will likely have a hand in overseeing the direction of a company’s culture. Companies can also discipline employees for deviations from stated cultural standards or for breaking legal and regulatory rules.

Tomorrow's Capitalist: My Search for the Soul of Business
by Alan Murray
Published 15 Dec 2022

Many, if not most, of the companies mentioned in this book have been involved in activities that cast shadows over their more altruistic efforts. JPMorgan was home to the London Whale scandal, where a single trader accumulated outsized positions in credit default swaps that led to a $6 billion loss and called into question the bank’s risk management systems. Google, despite its initial “Don’t Be Evil” motto, has been dogged by accusations that its business has been built on its misappropriation of other people’s work, and that its search engine favors its own services over outside competitors. Apple, like many of its tech brethren, manipulates global rules to pay an unconscionably low rate of tax on its activities.

Abolish Silicon Valley: How to Liberate Technology From Capitalism
by Wendy Liu
Published 22 Mar 2020

Why was this company so afraid of public criticism? Developing technology in a bubble seemed like a recipe for disaster when people around the world were depending on Google’s products — especially when Google’s technical workforce was wildly unrepresentative of the wider population.3 And the “Don’t Be Evil” motto served primarily as a reminder that Google did have the power to do evil, and people on the outside — or even on the inside, without the requisite level of security clearance — had to simply trust the insiders to do the right thing. But such trust seemed a little misplaced, given that even minor leaks were treated as career-ending betrayals; I didn’t even want to think about the penalties for whistleblowing or publicly challenging major decisions.

Free Speech: Ten Principles for a Connected World
by Timothy Garton Ash
Published 23 May 2016

Facebook, for example, shares your data with a company called Datalogix to establish what percentage of those who view an ad actually go on to buy a product from that advertiser.142 In a bracing book called You Are Not a Gadget, the virtual reality pioneer turned cybersceptic Jaron Lanier describes Google and Facebook as ‘spying/advertising empires’.143 These information businesses claim the data and results are all anonymised, but somewhere some machine and therefore potentially some person knows it is you. Hence the disconcerting experience that, minutes after searching for, buying online or simply emailing about, say, sandals, advertisements for sandals start popping up on our screens. (I choose a deliberately innocuous example.) Google’s most famous slogan is ‘Don’t be evil’. Yet as one Google engineer confided to another author, with a smile: ‘We’re not evil. We try really hard not to be evil. But if we wanted to, man, could we ever!’144 Beside personalised advertising and the gargantuan collection of personal data that underpins it, there is customised search.

…

See also Dahrendorf, Ralf; Domscheit-Berg, Daniel; East Germany; German language; Gutenberg, Johann; Koselleck, Reinhart; Küng, Hans; Mann, Heinrich; Morgenstern, Christian; Nolte, Ernst; Tucholsky, Kurt; Ulbricht, Walter; Zypries, Brigitte Germany Abolishes Itself (Sarrazin), 213 gestures, 8, 123–24, 149, 176 Ghonim, Wael, 315 Gibson, William, 22 Gladstone, Brooke, 196 ‘glass person,’ 324 global city, 18–19, 207 global north and south, journal citations, 176–77 Global Voices, 200 God, 244, 267–68 Godwin, Mike, 23 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 210 Goffman, Erving, 316 Gogol, Nikolai, 234 Goldacre, Ben, 153 Golden Rule, 109 Golden Shield (Great Firewall of China), 40, 362 Gomorrah (Saviano), 141–42 Gonzales, Alberto, 319–20 González, Mario Costeja, 307–8 Google, 169–70; algorithmic choice in Google car, 365; ‘autocomplete’ in Search, 303; banning cigarette/liquor ads, 52; becoming more ‘European,’ 308; Bettina Wulff suit against, 303; Bruce Leiter on, 93; Buzz social network, 289; China and, 26, 40, 47, 54; collecting information from Gmail, 169; and Communications Decency Act (US), 23; contradictory legal postures, 302; customised search results, 51; delisting requests, 308; ‘Don’t be evil’ slogan, 50–51; European or American norms on, 308; free access in poor countries, 358; and free speech, 168–69, 239, 285; goal of to make money, 50; González suit against, 307–8; googling as research starting point, 162; and Holocaust denial, 55; mission statement of, 167; near monopoly by, 169–70; Olympics editorial, 237; and paedophilia, 92, 168; personalisation of search results by, 134, 169–70; and privacy, 285, 289, 295, 303, 309; as private superpower, virtual country, 1, 21, 23–24, 31, 47–48; profits from ads, 169; and reputation management, 302; Search, 168, 237, 303; Search Quality Rating Guidelines, 187; self-made rules of, 84; selling freedom, 50; tailored search results, 51; Translate, 95, 176; value to versus value for, 284.

Facebook: The Inside Story
by Steven Levy
Published 25 Feb 2020

It was just about to launch its AdWords search advertising product, which would become one of the most successful products in history. “I really believed that was the future of the business,” she says. She was fine being a tractor in that effort, building an organization, changing the nature of ad sales from schmoozing to analytics. Sandberg was never one of the people you would hear talking about “Don’t Be Evil” or any of that stuff. She once remarked that, in her observation, a company’s beliefs were the opposite of its mantras. “My attitude has always been that you’d better keep your head down and do your work,” she once told me. “I delivered my numbers and focused on my metrics.” But by the end of 2007, it was time to leave Google.

…

We want to move fast, ship the thing that will get the impact that we want, and then keep going.” Indeed, the slogans, particularly “Move Fast and Break Things,” were prone to misinterpretation. “It meant to iterate and try things and not be afraid of failure—but not to be sloppy,” says Graham. “It didn’t mean to duct tape the server and run away.” But just as Google’s motto—“Don’t Be Evil”—would be used against it, the “break things” part of Facebook’s motto would be used by critics as a cudgel, when people were accusing Facebook of actually breaking things—breaking social order, breaking democracy, breaking civilization itself—like some digital version of a bull in a Restoration Hardware store.

Our Final Invention: Artificial Intelligence and the End of the Human Era
by James Barrat
Published 30 Sep 2013

We’re generally more focused on practical machine learning technologies like machine vision, speech recognition, and machine translation, which essentially is about building statistical models to match patterns—nothing close to the “thinking machine” vision of AGI. But I think Page’s quotation sheds more light on Google’s attitudes than Freidenfelds’s. And it helps explain Google’s evolution from the visionary, insurrectionist company of the 1990s, with the much touted slogan DON’T BE EVIL, to today’s opaque, Orwellian, personal-data-aggregating behemoth. The company’s privacy policy shares your personal information among Google services, including Gmail, Google+, YouTube, and others. Who you know, where you go, what you buy, who you meet, how you browse—Google collates it all.

The Authoritarian Moment: How the Left Weaponized America's Institutions Against Dissent
by Ben Shapiro
Published 26 Jul 2021

In fact, they celebrated it. Facebook’s mission statement for its first decade was “to make the world more open and connected.”19 Twitter said that its goal was “to give everyone the power to create and share ideas and information instantly, without barriers.”20 Google’s working motto was simple: “Don’t be evil.” For a while, it worked. The social media giants were essentially open platforms, with a light hand in terms of censorship. Then the 2016 election happened. The shock that greeted Trump’s victory in 2016 fundamentally altered the orientation of the social media platforms. That’s because, up until that moment, the personal political preferences of executives and staffers—overwhelmingly liberal—had meshed with their preferred political outcomes.

The Twittering Machine
by Richard Seymour
Published 20 Aug 2019

This way of describing our predicament runs the risk, innate to Christian demonology, of paranoia. It is less ‘they’re all out to get me’ than ‘evil is something that happens to me, rather than something I am involved in’. As with conspiracy theory, it externalizes evil. After all, the platforms are not only not demons; they are ostentatious about it. ‘Don’t be Evil’, as the Google slogan has it. They don’t, by themselves, generate the acedia, the generalized depression and weariness that they monetize. No more than the pharmaceutical industry does. They offer us a solution, an addiction which magnifies and potentiates acedia. But, as with all addictions, we succumb to it with our choices and our rationalizations.

The New Class Conflict
by Joel Kotkin
Published 31 Aug 2014

The Huffington Post has constructed a long list of the firm’s privacy violations.55 Google, too, is renowned for mining personal information. The company’s bid to use Google Plus as a platform for its other offerings represents just another attempt to create a “database for affinity” that might prove irresistible to prying advertisers.56 As one wag tweeted in 2013: “Google motto 2004: Don’t be evil. Google motto 2010: Evil is tricky to define. Google motto 2013: We make military robots.” It may be time, as blogger Joshua Rivera put it, to call Google “an evil empire.”57 But Google is hardly alone in pushing these violations of privacy. Apple has been hauled in front of the courts for its violations, while Consumer Reports has documented Facebook’s pervasive, and often deepening, privacy breaches, including such details as health conditions (which an insurer could use against someone), travel plans (convenient for burglars), and information about a person’s sexual orientation, religious affiliation, and ethnicity.

Brave New Work: Are You Ready to Reinvent Your Organization?
by Aaron Dignan
Published 1 Feb 2019

Every company that takes on traditional investment is (often unwittingly) promising to grow forever in exchange for capital now. While it can be hard to imagine in the early days, the very nature of growth beyond scale is exploitative. Take Google, the paragon of iconoclastic virtue when it rose to prominence with its “Don’t be evil” slogan. You can’t “organize the world’s information” without inadvertently (or intentionally) controlling the flow of that information. Or take Facebook, the social network whose noble mission is to “bring the world closer together.” As an ad-supported business, its growth depends on capturing more and more of our attention, which means it must—at a very fundamental cognitive level—manipulate and addict us.

Big Business: A Love Letter to an American Anti-Hero
by Tyler Cowen
Published 8 Apr 2019

I am somewhat worried that market concentration ratios in many parts of the American economy are rising, but most of those markets seem pretty contestable and offer consumers lots of choice. The upshot is that the analysts who raise this issue usually are exaggerating the problem, harm to consumers is hard to find, and American competition remains alive and well. 6. ARE THE BIG TECH COMPANIES EVIL? Google’s original motto, which endeared it to many geeks, was “Don’t be evil.” And indeed, for a long time it seemed the company realized this aspiration. People under thirty may not know how hit-or-miss it was to search the web prior to Google. It has greatly enhanced our ability to find the right restaurant reviews, look up medical information, research dating or business partners, and track down old friends, not to mention that it provides the means for good, link-based blogging, among many other advances.

How to Fix the Future: Staying Human in the Digital Age
by Andrew Keen
Published 1 Mar 2018

But how much self-imposed morality can we really expect from multi–hundred-billion-dollar companies that are currently accused of a raft of unethical behavior around the world, including monopolistic market practices, exploitation of their users’ data, and failure to pay their local taxes—not to mention the myriad other ethical scandals perpetually engulfing Big Tech? Although these companies are by no means intrinsically bad, they remain profit-driven businesses, answerable only to their shareholders or investors. Whatever seductive promises their don’t be evil–style slogans make, there is no such thing as a moral for-profit company, inside or outside Silicon Valley. For better or worse, the aim of these private superpowers is to dominate markets, not share them. Their goal is their bottom line, not ethics. And yes, it’s also encouraging that powerful Silicon Valley investors like Elon Musk, Reid Hoffman, and Peter Thiel have contributed significant capital to an open-source AI platform that, we are promised, won’t be owned or operated by a single data silo.

The Airbnb Story: How Three Ordinary Guys Disrupted an Industry, Made Billions...and Created Plenty of Controversy
by Leigh Gallagher
Published 14 Feb 2017

What happens to changing the world? What happens to “the United Nations at the kitchen table”? Can you have a social mission and be a big behemoth on Wall Street? Plenty of tech-industry giants, of course, claim they have missions. Facebook’s is “Make the world more open and connected.” Google had “Don’t be evil” until its new parent, Alphabet, changed it to “Do the right thing.” But balancing mission and Wall Street expectations is a tricky thing. “I really like these guys—they are genuine,” says Jessi Hempel, head of editorial for the online technology publication Backchannel, about the Airbnb founders.

@War: The Rise of the Military-Internet Complex
by Shane Harris
Published 14 Sep 2014

Considering that the NSA is the single biggest collector of zero day vulnerabilities, that information would help make Google more secure than others that don’t get access to such prized secrets. The agreement also lets the agency analyze intrusions that have already occurred, so it can help trace them back to their source. Google took a risk forming an alliance with the NSA. The company’s corporate motto, “Don’t be evil,” would seem at odds with the work of a covert surveillance and cyber warfare agency. But Google got useful information in return for its cooperation. Shortly after the China revelation, the government gave Sergey Brin, Google’s cofounder, a temporary security clearance that allowed him to attend a classified briefing about the campaign against his company.

Digital Bank: Strategies for Launching or Becoming a Digital Bank
by Chris Skinner
Published 27 Aug 2013

It would build its processes based upon the customer outside-in view of the interactions and user experience people desire, and it would target to overcome the things that piss off most people, such as lock-in fees, hidden charges, balloon payments on overdrafts and so on and so forth. It would make it clear what ‘fair’ means, by defining this and making sure it is practiced in everything we preach. A bit like Google’s “don’t be evil”, even though they sometimes appear to be, my new bank’s motto would be “don’t screw the customer”, and we’d make it clear how we would avoid doing that. We would support customers joining our “screw loose lounge” where they could rant and rave and discuss and debate, and we would have a “live and unscrewed” section for staff and management to air their hang ups and thumbs ups.

Peers Inc: How People and Platforms Are Inventing the Collaborative Economy and Reinventing Capitalism
by Robin Chase
Published 14 May 2015

Google and Facebook come to mind. Their founders were able to retain majority control, giving them leeway to manage far more than simple shareholder value. CEOs who choose to deliver on a triple bottom line (people, planet, profit) are great … except that they eventually have to leave. Google’s motto “Don’t be evil” is only as good as Larry Page’s interpretation of it. And even benevolent dictators are still dictators. A few companies—including Zipcar, in my opinion, but also BlaBlaCar and Etsy—will always deliver significant social and environmental benefits no matter how they are financed or who runs them, because they necessarily deliver positive externalities.

Ten Billion Tomorrows: How Science Fiction Technology Became Reality and Shapes the Future
by Brian Clegg
Published 8 Dec 2015

A final possible way to end civilization is arguably to just carry on the way things are at the moment. This is often seen as the way that climate change will overwhelm us, but many argue that the same laissez-faire attitude puts humanity in danger of subservience to corporations who may make token claims to have the good of humanity at heart (think of Google’s former corporate motto “Don’t be evil”), but in reality are driven by hard cash and shareholder returns, trampling individuals under foot. We started this chapter with the chill of the cold war threat of atomic annihilation. And during the 1960s and 1970s the world became familiar with antinuclear demonstrations. But the protests weren’t limited to calls for nuclear disarmament.

You Are Here: From the Compass to GPS, the History and Future of How We Find Ourselves
by Hiawatha Bray
Published 31 Mar 2014

The governments of South Korea, Australia, and New Zealand each found Google in violation of privacy laws; in March 2011 France punished Google with a fine of 100,000 euros. In March 2013 Google paid a total of $7 million to thirty-eight US states and the District of Columbia to settle their lawsuits over the Street View matter. For a company whose unofficial motto is “Don’t be evil,” the whole event was a bitter public humiliation. No surprise that in May 2010, Google said its Street View cars would no longer capture Wi-Fi mapping data. By then Google had recruited a global army of Wi-Fi mapmakers—the millions who carried cell phones that ran the company’s Android operating system.

Nothing but Net: 10 Timeless Stock-Picking Lessons From One of Wall Street’s Top Tech Analysts
by Mark Mahaney
Published 9 Nov 2021

GOOGLE—NOT A CONVENTIONAL COMPANY, NOT A CONVENTIONAL TAM Google’s S1 filing (its 2004 IPO document) began with a letter from its founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page. The first two sentences read: “Google is not a conventional company. We do not intend to become one.” Google largely lived up to this promise. It included the goals “don’t be evil” and “make the world a better place” in its founders’ letter. It promoted and maintained at its headquarters a college campus–like atmosphere of creativity and challenge, replete with gourmet cafes open day and night. Its first Analyst Day featured a presentation not by its CFO, George Reyes, but by its executive chef, Charlie Ayers.

Uberland: How Algorithms Are Rewriting the Rules of Work
by Alex Rosenblat
Published 22 Oct 2018

The ways that we interact with datacentric systems imply a contractual trust with platforms to protect our data privacy. And indeed, Netflix was roundly criticized for its privacy violations.58 The particular examples that Uber provides us with might have simply joined a long list of “oops” moments in which technology hit a nerve. But Uber is different. It is the legacy of a technology culture that cautioned “Don’t Be Evil,” the slogan that came from Google’s code of conduct around 2000. Similarly, Facebook, founded in 2004, announced that its mission was “to give people the power to share and make the world more open and connected” and, in 2017, adjusted it to: “Give people the power to build community and bring the world closer together.”59 Technology companies get the benefit of the doubt in American society, enjoying a high level of status and respect as powerful, entrepreneurial innovators that deliver a better future.

The Pirate's Dilemma: How Youth Culture Is Reinventing Capitalism
by Matt Mason

So capitalism responded by selling us punk, and mass-produced Ramones T-shirts for the whole family are now sold in shopping malls across the world. Antiestablishment slogans became the hallmark of big businesses interested in promoting themselves by supposedly empowering us with the D.I.Y. ethic. “Image Is Nothing,” says Sprite as it defiantly sells fizzy drinks. “Go Create,” Sony urges us. “Don't Be Evil,” Google advises. “Have It Your Way,” cries Burger King. “Just Do It,” bellows Nike. Apple tells the hoards that gather every time it opens a new store to “Think Different,” holding D.I.Y. seminars for Mac users, teaching them how to get the most out of punk-branded music software such as GarageBand.

Hiding in Plain Sight: The Invention of Donald Trump and the Erosion of America
by Sarah Kendzior
Published 6 Apr 2020

I was writing during the last gasps of the internet as a potential force for democracy, before Silicon Valley companies surrendered to the filthy lucre obtained by spying on citizens and data mining personal profiles for the benefit of hostile states. It was a time when people would learn that Google’s slogan was “Don’t Be Evil” and not burst into ironic laughter. American exceptionalism was always an illusion, and Americans had long been prone to paranoid conspiracies, but even I was surprised by the quickness with which US political culture came to mirror that of surveillance states. I had not anticipated how quickly the cyber-utopianism embraced by internet corporations would turn into nihilist abdication of the public good.

Life After Google: The Fall of Big Data and the Rise of the Blockchain Economy
by George Gilder
Published 16 Jul 2018

While some thirty thousand ecstatic nerds, some of them half-naked, dance and ululate below, techno-priests ignite a forty-foot genderless wooden statue together with a temple in the sand full of vatic testimonies. Like Google, Burning Man might be termed a commons cult: a communitarian religious movement that celebrates giving—free offerings with no expectation of return—as the moral center of an ideal economy of missionaries rather than mercenaries. It conveys the superiority of “don’t be evil” Google, in contrast to what Silicon Valley regards as the sinister history of Microsoft in the North. Burning Man’s website, like Google’s, presents a decalogue of communal principles. Authored by the founder Larry Harvey in 2004, the “10 Principles of Burning Man” would seem on the surface incompatible with the ethos of a giant corporation raking in money and headed by two of the world’s richest men: Radical Inclusion: no prerequisites for participation.

Consent of the Networked: The Worldwide Struggle for Internet Freedom
by Rebecca MacKinnon
Published 31 Jan 2012

The potential danger for people like Harriet somehow had not occurred to the engineers working on their sunny campus in Mountain View, California—apparently because Harriet’s concerns are so alien to their own life experience. They had not sought out anybody remotely like Harriet to help them test the new service. Google’s famous motto may be “don’t be evil.” Its internal product development processes heard no evil and knew no evil, but inadvertently did evil—even though the company had signed on to a pledge to uphold free speech and privacy. In response to complaints filed by privacy groups, in April 2011 the Federal Trade Commission issued a ruling that required Google to implement a comprehensive privacy program and submit to independent privacy audits for the next twenty years.

Maphead: Charting the Wide, Weird World of Geography Wonks
by Ken Jennings
Published 19 Sep 2011

If everything you do is geotagged, then everyone always knows where you are—which is awesome if you’re hoping to meet some friends after work for a drink but maybe not so awesome if potential burglars are casing your neighborhood to find out who’s not home, or if you’re dealing with an abusive ex or a child predator or even some stranger who got mad about something you posted online. We’re an Orwellian dystopia in the making, says Dobson, except that no shadowy government will be providing the surveillance. Instead, we’re opting to do it to ourselves. With Google’s famous “Don’t be evil” motto in mind, I ask Paul Rademacher if he worries about the new digital map technology—call it Maps 2.0—turning evil. He tells me that Michael Jones, Google Earth’s chief technologist, often points out that all new technologies seem scary, but months later you find yourself wondering what you ever did without them.

Early Retirement Extreme
by Jacob Lund Fisker
Published 30 Sep 2010

Decrease the volume and size but increase the sophistication of your activities and possessions. Measure prosperity by less activity, not more. Do fewer useless things. Work for the purpose of earning money for no more than five years of your life or five hours a week. Avoid generating waste and find ways to use the waste of others. Learn to use the system to your advantage, but don't be evil! Serve yourself rather than having others serve you. Instead, help them. Keep running costs down but pay for value. Maintain health to avoid the personal and monetary cost of sickness. Build up the capital to live as a capitalist or the skills to always find a new job. Focus on productive assets rather than stuff.

The Myth of Capitalism: Monopolies and the Death of Competition
by Jonathan Tepper
Published 20 Nov 2018

The ultimate loss from unpaid taxes is an estimated 60 billion euros a year for the weakest members of the European Union.20 While individuals and small businesses pay high levels of taxes, the share of corporate profits that multinationals have reported in tax havens has increased tenfold since the 1980s; much of this is coming from the large tech companies.21 The tech giants increase income inequality, because the losers are the people and small businesses who do pay taxes and the winners are the shareholders of the companies that use them to dodge taxes.22 The tech giants preach social solidarity and not being evil (Google recently decided to drop their motto “Don't be evil,” as it seemed out of fashion), while they funnel billions into offshore havens and channel their European operations through tax-friendly Ireland. While preaching the values of freedom and independence, they collect untold amounts of information on their users in vast spying operations. Not only do they avoid paying taxes in the democratic states where they have their headquarters, they have allowed themselves to become tools against these very states.

The Launch Pad: Inside Y Combinator, Silicon Valley's Most Exclusive School for Startups
by Randall Stross
Published 4 Sep 2013

But the thought of missing out on YC’s audacious experiment, funding so many startups at a time, was more painful than the thought of delaying the start of his next startup.25 At the same time that Harj Taggar was formally welcomed to the ranks of YC partners, so too was Paul Buchheit. Graham noted that Buchheit “was responsible for three of the best things Google has done”: developing Gmail; developing the prototype of Google’s advertising system; and coming up with Google’s guiding mantra, “Don’t Be Evil.” After leaving Google, he had gone on to cofound a startup, FriendFeed, which the previous year had become Facebook’s largest acquisition to date. Graham also gave him the highest praise he gave anyone: “one of the world’s best hackers.” The software technology that Graham had cut his teeth on at Viaweb in the 1990s was only a distant relation to the technology that hackers were working with now.

Cataloging the World: Paul Otlet and the Birth of the Information Age
by Alex Wright
Published 6 Jun 2014

Google’s recently established Brussels office—charged with managing public relations for the search 296 CONCLUSION giant’s contentious relationship with the European Union over ­privacy issues—seemed eager to prove its cultural bona fides and ­establish itself as a good corporate citizen. Indeed, Google has since initiated a series of other cultural sponsorships across Europe, trying to project an image in keeping with its corporate motto: “Don’t Be Evil,” a mantra that seems a distant echo of Otlet’s dictum that the Mundaneum must “always be good.” While Google’s troubled relationship with the European Union may have provided some impetus for the sponsorship, there were human factors at work as well. Google’s local marketing manager, Julien Blanchez, happened to hail from Mons, home of the Mundaneum museum, as did Prime Minister di Rupo, who for a time served as the city’s mayor.

Ghost Work: How to Stop Silicon Valley From Building a New Global Underclass
by Mary L. Gray and Siddharth Suri
Published 6 May 2019

B Corps are for-profit entities that register their intent to make a positive impact on its workers and society at large, through policies like fair labor practices, community giving campaigns, and clean environmental practices. The utility of the B Corp label is up for debate. Some argue that a vague mission—the corporate slogan equivalent of “Don’t be evil”—can water down the label’s meaning.7 But the point is to help make companies accountable to society as well as to shareholders. In the on-demand marketplace, B Corps like CloudFactory push back against the prevailing notion that people doing ghost work are expendable. They prioritize workers’ schedules, interests, and collaborations.

The Coming of Neo-Feudalism: A Warning to the Global Middle Class
by Joel Kotkin
Published 11 May 2020

Renn, “How Apple and Google Are Censoring the Mobile Web,” Real Clear Politics, August 24, 2017, https://www.realclearpolitics.com/2017/08/24/how_apple_and_google_are_censoring_the_mobile_web_419092.html; Jim Treacher, “It Seems Twitter’s ‘Trust and Safety Council’ Is Working Overtime to Ban Conservatives,” PJ Media, August 15, 2018, https://pjmedia.com/trending/it-seems-twitters-trust-and-safety-council-is-working-overtime-to-ban-conservatives/; Eric Lieberman, “Google’s New Fact-Check Feature Almost Exclusively Targets Conservative Sites,” Daily Caller, January 9, 2018, http://dailycaller.com/2018/01/09/googles-new-fact-check-feature-almost-exclusively-targets-conservative-sites/; Glenn Harlan Reynolds, “When Digital Platforms Become Censors,” Wall Street Journal, August 18, 2018, https://www.wsj.com/articles/when-digital-platforms-become-censors-1534514122; Karl Zinsmeister, “How the Tech Worldview Affects Free-Speech Battles,” Real Clear Politics, October 3, 2018, https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2018/10/03/how_the_tech_worldview_affects_free-speech_battles_138234.html. 36 Daniel Friedman, “How Free Speech Dies Online,” Quillette, June 23, 2019, https://quillette.com/2019/06/23/how-free-speech-dies-online/. 37 Paul Bedard, “Social media companies back liberals, 72% ‘censor’ views they don’t like,” Washington Examiner, June 28, 2018, https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/washington-secrets/pew-social-media-companies-back-liberals-72-censor-views-they-dont-like; Brad Parscale, “Big Tech is becoming Big Brother,” Washington Examiner, August 16, 2018, https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/op-eds/brad-parscale-big-tech-is-becoming-big-brother. 38 Mark Epstein, “The Google-Facebook Duopoly Threatens Diversity of Thought,” Wall Street Journal, December 18, 2017, https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-google-facebook-duopoly-threatens-diversity-of-thought-1513642519; Robert Tracinski, “‘Don’t Be Evil’? Google Is Becoming a Police State,” Federalist, January 12, 2018, http://thefederalist.com/2018/01/12/dont-be-evil-google-is-trying-to-become-a-police-state/. 39 Richard L. Hasen, “Speech in America is fast, cheap and out of control,” Los Angeles Times, August 18, 2017, http://www.latimes.com/opinion/op-ed/la-oe-hasen-cheap-speech-democracy-20170818-story.html. 40 Ruchir Sharma, “When Will the Tech Bubble Burst?”

An Ugly Truth: Inside Facebook's Battle for Domination
by Sheera Frenkel and Cecilia Kang
Published 12 Jul 2021

“If you’re offered a seat on a rocket ship, get on, don’t ask what seat.”3 The company was the most exciting start-up at the time, its name already used as a verb for finding anything online, and it was destined to have one of the biggest IPOs on the market. But Sandberg was primarily taken with the vision of its founders, two former doctoral students at Stanford whose aim was to make the world’s information universally accessible and useful. After Larry Page and Sergey Brin founded the search engine in 1998, they’d adopted an unofficial motto: “Don’t Be Evil.” This sense of idealism resonated with Sandberg. The work felt important. She also had personal reasons to return to the West Coast. Her sister, Michelle, lived in San Francisco, and Sandberg had many friends in Los Angeles. She began to date one of those friends, Dave Goldberg, a music tech start-up founder in 2002.

Golden Gates: Fighting for Housing in America
by Conor Dougherty
Published 18 Feb 2020

The company’s CEO, Adam Hooper, went to Penn State and brokered commercial real estate deals in Sacramento before entering Y Combinator, the famed “accelerator” that serves as a kind of exclusive boot camp for start-up founders, in 2013. A year later RealCrowd raised $1.6 million in seed funding from investors including Initialized Capital, a San Francisco venture capital firm, and Paul Buchheit, a former Google engineer who created Gmail and is credited with suggesting “Don’t Be Evil” as the company’s former motto. Fawning industry articles and Q&As often position young executives like Hooper and Sharkansky as innovators who cater to the desires of millennial tenants by buying in cool neighborhoods and outfitting their units with the right consumer tech. “I recently visited one of our properties in West LA and one of the tenants ran up to me to tell me how excited he was about the Nest Thermostat and that was the amenity that sealed the deal for his lease,” Sharkansky said in an interview with a blog called A Student of the Real Estate Game.

Remix: Making Art and Commerce Thrive in the Hybrid Economy
by Lawrence Lessig
Published 2 Jan 2009

“But,” the Journal warned, “the mere activity of digitizing and storing millions of books . . . raises a serious legal question.” Google was ignoring these questions, the Journal charged. “Intellectual property was important enough to the Founding Fathers for them to mention it explicitly in the Constitution. We assume that when Google says ‘Don’t Be Evil’ this includes ‘Thou Shall Not Steal.’ ”4 (Actually, the Constitution doesn’t explicitly mention “intellectual property.” It speaks of “exclusive rights” to “writings and discoveries”—aka, monopolies. To say that means the framers endorsed IP is like saying they endorsed “war” because the Constitution mentions that as well.)

Rush Hour: How 500 Million Commuters Survive the Daily Journey to Work
by Iain Gately
Published 6 Nov 2014

Most accidents are caused by human error. If motorcars could detect each other, could communicate among themselves, and might be programmed to avoid collisions, then rush hours would be far safer. Google, which is leading research in autonomous vehicles, is also motivated by safety. Its informal corporate motto is ‘Don’t be Evil’, and it believes that driverless cars will end the global carnage on the roads that claims more victims each year than warfare. In the same speech in which CFO Patrick Pichette dismissed telecommuting, he also stated that, in an ideal world, ‘nobody should be driving cars… Look at factorial math and probabilities of everything that could go wrong, times the number of cars out there… That’s why you have gridlock… It makes no sense to make people drive cars.’

The Nanny State Made Me: A Story of Britain and How to Save It
by Stuart Maconie
Published 5 Mar 2020

When I grumble about the Beeb and its moods and caprices, its obsessions and foibles, I do so while still thinking that people like Alan and James are the best kind of public servant, doing their job with the best of intentions and with great ability. Out there though, beyond the arms of Auntie and her old-fashioned belief in principles, ethics and a national good, there is another kind of media now and another kind of broadcasting. Don’t be evil, they implore you, which is a bit rich I think, as it’s their world where the real nasty stuff lies. In 1998, 9 per cent of British homes had access to the internet, most of these inhabited by geeks, weirdos or the professionally obligated. Twenty years later it was over 90 per cent. No one has embraced the online world as passionately as the British.

Stakeholder Capitalism: A Global Economy That Works for Progress, People and Planet
by Klaus Schwab
Published 7 Jan 2021

Wall Street Journal editors headlined it: “Competition Is for Losers.”19 Of Google, he wrote: A monopoly like Google is different. Since it doesn't have to worry about competing with anyone, it has wider latitude to care about its workers, its products and its impact on the wider world. Google's motto—“Don't be evil”—is in part a branding ploy, but it is also characteristic of a kind of business that is successful enough to take ethics seriously without jeopardizing its own existence. In business, money is either an important thing or it is everything. Monopolists can afford to think about things other than making money; non-monopolists can't.

Stakeholder Capitalism: A Global Economy That Works for Progress, People and Planet
by Klaus Schwab and Peter Vanham
Published 27 Jan 2021

Wall Street Journal editors headlined it: “Competition Is for Losers.”19 Of Google, he wrote: A monopoly like Google is different. Since it doesn't have to worry about competing with anyone, it has wider latitude to care about its workers, its products and its impact on the wider world. Google's motto—“Don't be evil”—is in part a branding ploy, but it is also characteristic of a kind of business that is successful enough to take ethics seriously without jeopardizing its own existence. In business, money is either an important thing or it is everything. Monopolists can afford to think about things other than making money; non-monopolists can't.

Fortunes of Change: The Rise of the Liberal Rich and the Remaking of America
by David Callahan
Published 9 Aug 2010

Many companies have embraced a Bobo (Bourgeois Bohemian) ethos in their corporate culture, dispensing with dress codes and overly rigid hierarchies. Google, one of the most influential companies in the United States today, personifies these trends. Its top executives contribute almost exclusively to Democrats and have made the company carbon-neutral. “Don’t be evil” is Google’s informal corporate slogan. In his famous 1971 memo charging that the free enterprise system was “under broad attack,” Lewis Powell called on business leaders to push back against liberalism. Many heeded this call, helping bankroll the rise of the conservative “counter-establishment” and a new age of c10.indd 215 5/11/10 6:25:45 AM 216 fortunes of change Republican power.

The End of Power: From Boardrooms to Battlefields and Churches to States, Why Being in Charge Isn’t What It Used to Be
by Moises Naim
Published 5 Mar 2013

Of course, today IBM is out of the PC market, and its market capitalization value is dwarfed by that of Apple, which, in turn, is being criticized for maintaining its own Big Brotheresque grip on its operating system, hardware, stores, and consumer experience. Google, incorporated in 1998 with the informal hacker ethos and corporate motto of “Don’t Be Evil,” is now one of the world’s biggest corporations (as measured by market capitalization) and is seen in some quarters as akin to the Antichrist, single-handedly destroying newspapers, crushing rivals, and violating consumer privacy. Increasing wealth and income inequality in the United States in the last twenty years, along with the global trend toward massive CEO pay packages and banker bonuses, have fed the perception that those who get to the top stay there, remote and above the cares that afflict lesser mortals.

The Fifth Domain: Defending Our Country, Our Companies, and Ourselves in the Age of Cyber Threats
by Richard A. Clarke and Robert K. Knake
Published 15 Jul 2019

We knew the seriousness with which cyber threats were taken in Washington, but didn’t see the same level of concern in the private sector. Unfortunately, much of what we wrote about cyber threats turned out to be right, but things have also changed a lot since then, including our prescriptions. When we wrote Cyber War, Silicon Valley, still stuck in its “Don’t Be Evil” phase, wouldn’t accept that its inventions had the potential to cause real harm. Our intention was to scare government and corporate leaders into addressing the threat before the prospect of cyber war turned into a real cyber war. In the intervening decade, far too little has happened to respond to the threat, while many of our predictions on the emergence of war in cyberspace have regrettably come to be true.

Why We Drive: Toward a Philosophy of the Open Road
by Matthew B. Crawford
Published 8 Jun 2020

Presumably it would bring a similar ethos to the management of cities. TRUSTEESHIP THROUGH INFRASTRUCTURE Of all the platform firms, Google is singular. It’s near monopoly on search (about 90 percent) puts it in a position to steer thought. And increasingly, it avows the steering of thought as its unique responsibility. Famously founded on the principle “Don’t be evil,” it has since taken up the mission of actively doing good, according to its own lights. In an important article titled “Google.gov,” the law professor Adam J. White writes that Google views “society’s challenges today as social-engineering problems” and aspires to “reshape Americans’ informational context, ensuring that we make choices based only upon what they consider the right kind of facts—while denying that there could be any values or politics embedded in the effort.”

Philanthrocapitalism
by Matthew Bishop , Michael Green and Bill Clinton
Published 29 Sep 2008

I believe large, successful corporations have a number of resources and have an obligation to apply some of those resources to at least try to solve or ameliorate a number of the world’s problems and ultimately to make the world a better place,” Brin explained. “We believe strongly that in the long term, we will be better served—as shareholders and in all other ways—by a company that does good things for the world even if we forgo some short-term gains,” elaborated Page. To emphasize the point, the firm famously adopted an unofficial motto: “Don’t be evil.” This “serves as a reminder to all our employees to consider the consequences of our actions,” Page told the Global Philanthropy Forum, which he and Brin hosted in 2007 at the Googleplex. Then he joked, “Perhaps it was a mistake—we should have said, ‘Be good.’ ” According to Google legend, when the pair first met in 1995, as computer science students at Stanford University, they were “not terribly fond of each other.”

The Metaverse: And How It Will Revolutionize Everything
by Matthew Ball
Published 18 Jul 2022

Just as important, the leaders of blockchain platforms and companies have significantly less control over their users and developers than those who build on traditional databases and systems, in that they cannot forcibly bundle a user’s identity, her data, payments, content, services, and so on. Chris Dixon, a crypto-focused venture capitalist at Andreessen Horowitz, argues that if the dominant ethos of Web 2.0 was “Don’t be evil,” the phrase that (in)famously served as Google’s unofficial motto, then a (blockchain-based) Web3 is “Can’t be evil.” It’s unlikely, however, that all data is “on chain,” meaning few experiences will be fully “decentralized” and therefore remain de facto centralized or at least strongly controlled by a given party.

Website Optimization
by Andrew B. King
Published 15 Mar 2008

Man declared dead, says he feels "pretty good" Zach Dunlap says he feels "pretty good" four months after he was declared brain dead and doctors were about to remove his organs for transplant. http://www.cnn.com/2008/US/03/24/NotDead.ap/index.html How Apple Got Everything Right By Doing Everything Wrong Apple succeeds by going against Silicon Valley wisdom, ignoring business best practices, bucking the "don't be evil" ideals Google has tried to uphold. Wired.com's Leander Kahney, author of the new book "Inside Steve's Brain" (due out this spring) and the Cult of Mac blog, explores why for Steve Jobs, the regular rules do not apply. http://www.wired.com/techbiz/it/magazine/16-04/bz_apple A New Tool From Google Alarms Sites Google's new search-within-search feature has sparked fears from publishers and retailers that users will be siphoned away through ad sales to competitors. http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/24/business/media/24ecom.html Well-written headlines and decks can increase your readership, shore up brand loyalty, and boost your rankings.

Plutocrats: The Rise of the New Global Super-Rich and the Fall of Everyone Else
by Chrystia Freeland
Published 11 Oct 2012

Carnegie asserted that knights of capitalism like himself “and the law of competition between these” were “not only beneficial, but essential to the future progress of the race.” No one would talk like that today, but our champions of capital do like to describe their work in strikingly moral terms. Google’s company motto is “Don’t be evil,” and at a recent company conference, Larry Page, Google’s cofounder and now its CEO, said earnestly that one of Google’s greatest accomplishments was to save lives—thanks to the search engine, for instance, people can type in their symptoms, learn immediately they are having a heart attack, and get life-saving help sooner than they would have otherwise.

Machines of Loving Grace: The Quest for Common Ground Between Humans and Robots
by John Markoff
Published 24 Aug 2015

Google initially began by collecting and organizing human knowledge and then making it available to humans as part of a glorified Memex, the original global information retrieval system first proposed by Vannevar Bush in the Atlantic Monthly in 1945.11 As the company has evolved, however, it has started to push heavily toward systems that replace rather than extend humans. Google’s executives have obviously thought to some degree about the societal consequences of the systems they are creating. Their corporate motto remains “Don’t be evil.” Of course, that is nebulous enough to be construed to mean almost anything. Yet it does suggest that as a company Google is concerned with more than simply maximizing shareholder value. For example, Peter Norvig, a veteran AI scientist who has been director of research at Google since 2001, points to partnerships between human and computer as the way out of the conundrum presented by the emergence of increasingly intelligent machines.

The Establishment: And How They Get Away With It
by Owen Jones
Published 3 Sep 2014

The company simply designated its British office a marketing operation, existing to support its Irish headquarters. As such, it merely routed its British sales through Ireland. Again, it was a clever – and yes, legal – scam. The company ‘did do evil’, claimed Margaret Hodge in a rebuttal to the company’s corporate motto, ‘Don’t be evil’. In another twist, the tax-avoiders included companies benefiting from the sell-off of public services, whose profits were therefore directly subsidized by state revenues. Some £2 billion of public money had been handed to Atos and G4S in 2012, but neither paid any corporation tax, while Serco and Capita paid derisory amounts.

The Wires of War: Technology and the Global Struggle for Power
by Jacob Helberg
Published 11 Oct 2021

The Business of War “We believe that Google should not be in the business of war,” stated an April 2018 petition signed by roughly 4,000 employees and addressed to CEO Sundar Pichai.63 At issue was a Google contract, code-named Project Maven, to help the Pentagon deploy artificial intelligence to analyze drone footage. Such a capability could conceivably facilitate U.S. strikes against terrorists or other adversaries, and it rankled Googlers who were drawn to the company’s “Don’t Be Evil” ethos and still smarting from the Snowden disclosures. Though the contract was quite small—estimated at $9 million to $15 million64—its opponents feared it meant Google would effectively be joining the military-industrial complex. Several Googlers even resigned in protest. The petition called for Google to pull out of Project Maven and announce a policy that neither Google nor any subsidiaries would “ever build warfare technology.”65 A few months later, Google announced that Maven would not be renewed.66 The company followed up by releasing a set of AI principles, pledging that Google would not develop AI for “weapons or other technologies whose principal purpose or implementation is to cause or directly facilitate injury to people.”67 That August, however, an explosive article in the Intercept revealed the existence of another Google project, this one known as Dragonfly.

The Powerful and the Damned: Private Diaries in Turbulent Times
by Lionel Barber
Published 5 Nov 2020

He is the (paper) billionaire brand ambassador, the bridge between the Google software engineers in their own virtual world and the real world of politicians, journalists and the general public. Schmidt is beyond borderline arrogant. Every other sentence ends with a supercilious smile. Today Schmidt is making an effort to be charming. I suspect he’s angling for more favourable coverage. Google came up with a catch-all ‘Don’t be evil’ company motto which gave them a near free pass on any ethical complaints for a while. Their search business has been an enormous boon for consumers; but as Google’s power has grown, it has started to attract bad publicity in the UK and on the continent. People are muttering that Google doesn’t pay enough tax.

The Net Delusion: The Dark Side of Internet Freedom
by Evgeny Morozov
Published 16 Nov 2010

“Communicators with Tim Sparapani.” Communicators (video). C-SPAN, March 8, 2010. www.c-spanvideo.org/program/292422-1. Dabashi, Hamid. “A Tale of Two Cities.” Al-Ahram Weekly, August 20, 2009. weekly.ahram.org.eg/2009/961 /op51.htm. Dickie, Mure. “China Traps Online Dissent.” Financial Times, November 12, 2007. “Don’t Be Evil.” New Republic, April 21, 2010. Eltahawy, Mona. “Facebook , YouTube and Twitter Are the New Tools of Protest in the Arab World.” Washington Post, August 7, 2010. Esfandiari, Golnaz. “Authorities Warn Iranians Not to Protest—By SMS.” Transmission Blog (RFE/RL), November 20, 2009. www.rferl.org/content/Authorities_Warn_Iranians_Not_To_Protest_By_SMS/1883679.html. ———.

The Facebook Effect
by David Kirkpatrick
Published 19 Nov 2010

Chris Cox, the vice president of product and who works alongside Zuckerberg almost daily, says, “Mark would rather see our business fail in an attempt to do what is right and to do something great and meaningful, than be a big, lame company.” A watchword over the years at Facebook has been “Don’t be lame.” Cox says it means don’t do something just to make more money or because everybody is telling you to. It is Facebook’s counterpoint to Google’s motto ‘Don’t be evil.’” Though Facebook is filling out with executives of all ages, people in their twenties still constitute a critical mass. They understand how Zuckerberg thinks because they are much like him. They take the impact of their work with profound seriousness, even as they seem to spend much of the day wiggling erratically around the vast office on two-wheeled RipStick skateboards.

Life Inc.: How the World Became a Corporation and How to Take It Back
by Douglas Rushkoff
Published 1 Jun 2009

It’s not what they were built for. The corporation excels at extracting value from communities and reducing their ability to take care of themselves. New technologies, new charters, and new personalities don’t change this basic fact. The Google corporation may tell its workers that the company lives by the credo “Don’t be evil,” but its operations and business model are classically corporatist and singularly opportunistic. The company’s main claim to virtue is that it fights for “open systems” in all media and on all platforms. Technologically, this means preventing cell-phone companies from locking their phones, Internet providers from blocking certain activities, and wireless carriers from restricting downloads.

The Master Switch: The Rise and Fall of Information Empires
by Tim Wu
Published 2 Nov 2010

Likewise, Apple, the maker of the iPhone, has been, in effect, shamed into allowing apps, such as Skype or Line2, that compete with its own services. Meanwhile Verizon, a born-and-bred Baby Bell, gains public applause by publicly declaring itself an “open” company. And Google, one of the great corporate hegemons of our time, does likewise under its banner “Don’t Be Evil.” Whatever its missteps and shortcomings, that firm has, so far, done more than any other to promote what we have been describing as a constitutional policy of separations for the information industry. And while the extent of Google’s commitment has been exceptional, the basic impulse is not. In fact, rare is the firm willing to assert an intention and a right to dominate layers of the information industry beyond its core business, an ambition that someone like Theodore Vail, Adolph Zukor, or David Sarnoff would have proclaimed with unabashed glee.

The Patient Will See You Now: The Future of Medicine Is in Your Hands
by Eric Topol
Published 6 Jan 2015

N. Jones, “The Learning Machines,” Nature 505 (2014): 146–148. 36. J. Markoff, “Scientists See Promise in Deep-Learning Programs,” New York Times, November 24, 2012, http://www.nytimes.com/2012/11/24/science/scientists-see-advances-in-deep-learning-a-part-of-artificial-intelligence.html. 37. “Don’t Be Evil, Genius,” The Economist, February 1, 2014, http://www.economist.com/node/21595462/print. 38. J. Pearson, “Superintelligent AI Could Wipe Out Humanity, If We’re Not Ready for It,” Motherboard, April 23, 2014, http://motherboard.vice.com/read/super-intelligent-ai-could-wipe-out-humanity-if-were-not-ready-for-it. 39.

Actionable Gamification: Beyond Points, Badges and Leaderboards
by Yu-Kai Chou
Published 13 Apr 2015

In the case of Google, they implemented many White Hat designs into their company culture. The first thing Google did was implement Core Drive 1: Epic Meaning & Calling. Google is widely known for having the mission statement, “Organizing the world’s information and making it universally accessible and useful” as well as the catchy slogan, “Don’t be evil.” Because of that, many talented engineers felt that, “I could earn a paycheck anywhere, but at Google, I’m creating an impact in the world. Not only that, I’m part of the good guys, and that’s really valuable for me!” In regards to Core Drive 2: Development & Accomplishment, besides the usual raises and promotions, Google realizes that not every engineer can become a manager, but every engineer needs to feel a sense of progress and development.

Masters of Management: How the Business Gurus and Their Ideas Have Changed the World—for Better and for Worse
by Adrian Wooldridge
Published 29 Nov 2011

The proponents of corporate culture hardly strengthen their case by putting so much emphasis on mission statements, which usually read like lists of buzzwords strung together in no particular order (there is even an automatic “mission statement generator” that does the stringing together for you). Google has successfully mocked the mission statement industry by adopting the simple formula “don’t be evil.” Instead of a hefty rule book, Nordstrom’s employees are issued a single piece of paper that reads “Use your good judgment in all situations.” Still, there is no doubt that the best companies are guided by a core set of values, values that they work hard at refining and instilling into their employees.

The Cult of We: WeWork, Adam Neumann, and the Great Startup Delusion
by Eliot Brown and Maureen Farrell
Published 19 Jul 2021

He wouldn’t do more deals with them: Ibid. CHAPTER 11: CATNIP FOR MILLENNIALS large financial loss with Bernie Madoff: Kevin McCoy, “Madoff Victims Speak Out—in Writing,” USA Today, Dec. 8, 2014. The office culture was different: Interview with Carl Pierre, May 2020. with the pursuit of utopianism: “Don’t Be Evil: Fred Turner on Utopias, Frontiers, and Brogrammers,” Logic, Dec. 1, 2017. Facebook preached its societal good: George Packer, “Change the World,” New Yorker, May 20, 2013. would lead the disaffected youth: Tamar Weinberg, “SXSW: Mark Zuckerberg Keynote,” Techipedia, March 10, 2008. sometimes he’d walk around sweaty: Eliot Brown, “How Adam Neumann’s Over-the-Top Style Built WeWork.

When McKinsey Comes to Town: The Hidden Influence of the World's Most Powerful Consulting Firm
by Walt Bogdanich and Michael Forsythe
Published 3 Oct 2022

“On my first day,” she recalled, “I said, ‘I don’t want to work for any oil companies.’ ” Karma said he didn’t want to work for a pharmaceutical company. McKinsey honored both requests. “My first project was working for a local museum,” said Rosenthal, now a history professor at the University of California, Berkeley. Other companies talk about doing well by doing good. Google once had a simple motto: “Don’t be evil.” That motto disappeared from the preamble to its code of conduct in 2018 during the tenure of its chief executive, a former McKinsey consultant, Sundar Pichai. Few companies promote “values” as a recruiting tool with the fervor of McKinsey. The sales pitch often begins when candidates are asked in interviews to solve business problems, such as how to improve vaccine distribution in Africa, an issue McKinsey actually dealt with in Nigeria.

Vulture Capitalism: Corporate Crimes, Backdoor Bailouts, and the Death of Freedom
by Grace Blakeley
Published 11 Mar 2024

, “to be bought out and absorbed is often the ultimate ambition of the small business.” Baran and Sweezy, Monopoly Capital. 124. Baran and Sweezy, Monopoly Capital. 125. Zia Qureshi, “The Rise of Corporate Market Power,” Brookings Institute, May 21, 2019, https://www.brookings.edu/articles/the-rise-of-corporate-market-power/. 126. Rana Foroohar, Don’t Be Evil: The Case against Big Tech (London: Penguin UK, 2019). 127. Kenneth Rogoff, “Big Tech Is a Big Problem,” Project Syndicate, July 2, 2018, https://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/regulating-big-tech-companies-by-kenneth-rogoff-2018-07. 128. Qureshi, “The Rise of Corporate Market Power.” 129.

Computer: A History of the Information Machine
by Martin Campbell-Kelly and Nathan Ensmenger
Published 29 Jul 2013

To an unparalleled degree, both Facebook and Google maintain and use massive collections of personal information on users—data that is invaluable to advertisers in targeting customers. Perceived responsible use of this information is fundamental to Facebook and Google’s continued existence. Google, which has long publicized “Don’t be evil” as its company motto, is perhaps more vulnerable as switching to another search engine is quick, free, and easy. With social networking sites like Facebook, much of the value to users extends from the substantial time they have already invested in building a network and profile content. As with physical spaces, in cyberspace people often want to be together with their friends.

Why We Can't Afford the Rich
by Andrew Sayer
Published 6 Nov 2014

63 Like all companies and other organisations, these businesses depend on a workforce and a customer-base that is educated, a health system that keeps their workers healthy and a public infrastructure, including a legal system. While the little people pay their taxes for all these things and more, many incredibly wealthy companies free-ride on them. The double Irish and the Dutch sandwich Google’s sixth ‘core value’ is: ‘Do the right thing: don’t be evil. Honesty and Integrity in all we do. Our business practices are beyond reproach. We make money by doing good things.’64 Google cut its taxes by US$3.1 billion, using a technique that moves most of its foreign profits through Ireland and the Netherlands to Bermuda. These strategies, known to lawyers as the double Irish and the Dutch sandwich, helped Google to reduce its overseas tax rate to 2.4%.65 Margaret Hodge, who chairs the UK parliament’s Public Accounts Committee, took Google’s UK Vice-President, Matt Brittin, to task over this: ‘You are a company that says you “do no evil”.

Terms of Service: Social Media and the Price of Constant Connection
by Jacob Silverman
Published 17 Mar 2015

How far gone must you be to see this as beneficial? Compared to this kind of talk, Google’s totalizing vision—“to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful”—sounds like a public service, rather than a grandiose, privacy-destroying monopoly. Google’s mission statement, along with its self-inoculating “Don’t Be Evil” slogan, has made it acceptable for other companies to speak of world-straddling ambitions. LinkedIn’s CEO describes his site thusly: “Imagine a platform that can digitally represent every opportunity in the world.” Factual wants to identify every fact in the world. Whereas once we hoped for free municipal WiFi networks, now Facebook and Cisco are providing WiFi in thousands of stores around the United States, a service free so long as you check into Facebook on your smartphone and allow Facebook to know whenever you’re out shopping.

Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow
by Yuval Noah Harari
Published 1 Mar 2015

Customers need to decide what is most important to them – price, or something else.’3 Professor Andersson can go to sleep at night with a clean conscience. The fact that customers are buying his enhanced animal products implies that he is meeting their needs and desires and is therefore doing good. By the same logic, if some multinational corporation wants to know whether it lives up to its ‘Don’t be evil’ motto, it need only take a look at its bottom line. If it makes loads of money, it means that millions of people like its products, which implies that it is a force for good. If someone objects and says that people might make the wrong choice, he will be quickly reminded that the customer is always right, and that human feelings are the source of all meaning and authority.

Coders: The Making of a New Tribe and the Remaking of the World
by Clive Thompson
Published 26 Mar 2019

“a highly responsive audience”: Dipayan Ghosh and Ben Scott, “Digital Deceit: The Technologies Behind Precision Propaganda on the Internet,” New America (policy paper), January 2018, accessed August 21, 2018, https://www.newamerica.org/public-interest-technology/policy-papers/digitaldeceit/. “But hatred favors Facebook”: Vaidhyanathan, Antisocial Media, 195, Kindle. “says Wernher von Braun”: “Don’t Be Evil: Fred Turner on Utopias, Frontiers, and Brogrammers,” Logic 5 (Winter 2017), accessed August 21, 2018, https://logicmag.io/03-dont-be-evil/. or “doxing” you: Taylor Wofford, “Is Gamergate about Media Ethics or Harassing Women? Harassment, the Data Shows,” Newsweek, October 25, 2014, accessed August 21, 2018, https://www.newsweek.com/gamergate-about-media-ethics-or-harassing-women-harassment-data-show-279736; Brad Glasgow, “A Definition of Twitter Harassment,” Medium, November 2, 2015, accessed August 21, 2018, https://medium.com/@Brad_Glasgow/a-definition-of-twitter-harassment-f8acfa9ae3a8; Simon Parkin, “Gamergate: A Scandal Erupts in the Video-Game Community,” New Yorker, October 17, 2014, accessed August 21, 2018, https://www.newyorker.com/tech/elements/gamergate-scandal-erupts-video-game-community.

MacroWikinomics: Rebooting Business and the World
by Don Tapscott and Anthony D. Williams
Published 28 Sep 2010

In other words, will there be one Internet for the free world, and one for people in China, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Vietnam, and other places where they see only what their leaders allow them to see? Or will the Internet become a place where everyone is free to see everything, minus that limited set of things which clear, explicit global rules specify should not be available? Moreover, what would you do in Google’s shoes? Would you stick to your principles (don’t be evil), even when your share of the world’s largest market for Internet services is at stake? Or would you compromise now and hope that China’s leaders eventually loosen the reins on free speech and democracy? Tough questions. Some companies will argue that it is not their responsibility or indeed their prerogative to meddle in the domestic affairs of sovereign nations.

Troublemakers: Silicon Valley's Coming of Age
by Leslie Berlin
Published 7 Nov 2017

She and the other workers also had more control over the pace of their work, since it could take hours to add parts to all the printed circuit boards in a box.8 “It wasn’t Lucy in the chocolate factory,” she explains, referring to the classic 1952 episode of I Love Lucy in which the title character is overwhelmed by the onslaught of candies that she is supposed to wrap as they speed past her on a conveyor belt.9 A quarter century before Google included “Don’t be evil” in its code of conduct, ROLM listed “Be a great place to work” as a corporate goal alongside profits and growth. Aside from stock options, which were reserved for those cofounder Bob Maxfield calls “our most creative and top people,” every benefit or perk at ROLM was available to every employee in the company.10 Everyone could participate in generous medical and dental plans, as well as profit sharing and reduced-rate stock purchase plans.

Tribe of Mentors: Short Life Advice From the Best in the World
by Timothy Ferriss
Published 14 Jun 2017

Brian Erwin, at the time my VP of marketing, came up with this line at a company executive retreat in about 2000, when I remarked wryly that more than one Internet billionaire had told me that he’d started his business with what he’d learned from an O’Reilly book. Brian suggested we embrace that principle, and I’ve never looked back. I once tried to explain to Eric Schmidt why I thought this would be a better guiding light for Google than “Don’t be evil!” It’s measurable—you can actually compare what you get out of an activity to what others do. Google actually does do some of that measurement in its annual economic impact report, but I don’t think they’d be heading into antitrust trouble right now if they had spent more time thinking about the health of their ecosystem as they develop new services.

Future Crimes: Everything Is Connected, Everyone Is Vulnerable and What We Can Do About It
by Marc Goodman
Published 24 Feb 2015

Of course if Google told you all this, you might be freaked out, so instead a pretty ruse was created, a fig leaf of sorts. When Google was founded, it projected itself as the underdog, the little guy battling evil Microsoft. In fact, Google would tell its users that it was so benevolent that it decided to make “Don’t be evil” its official company motto. To allay any lingering doubts, Google’s icons and graphics, like its childlike multicolored logo and the adorable little green Android guy, were created to be so cute and nonthreatening that surely they could be trusted. Google Doodles, drawings on its home page celebrating everyone from Martin Luther King to Gandhi, further reassured the public that these were the good guys.

The Stack: On Software and Sovereignty
by Benjamin H. Bratton
Published 19 Feb 2016

By comparison Assange's When Google Met Wikileaks is a fascinating, self-contradictory, hyperactive tangle of ideas, accusations, and bizarre rationalizations. Within critical Google discourse it is in a league of its own, for both better or worse. Julian Assange, When Google Met Wikileaks (New York: OR Books, 2014). 64.  See Julian Assange, “The Banality of ‘Don't Be Evil,’” New York Times, June 1, 2013, http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/02/opinion/sunday/the-banality-of-googles-dont-be-evil.html It was later republished in Assange, When WikiLeaks Met Google. 65.  As recently occurred in Turkey, when the AK Party tried to shut down Twitter, and the government also tried to shut off access to Google DNS as well.

The Age of Surveillance Capitalism
by Shoshana Zuboff
Published 15 Jan 2019

Menell, “2014: Brand Totalitarianism” (UC Berkeley Public Law Research Paper, University of California, September 4, 2013), http://papers.ssrn.com/abstract=2318492; “Move Over, Big Brother,” Economist, December 2, 2004, http://www.economist.com/node/3422918; Wojciech Borowicz, “Privacy in the Internet of Things Era,” Next Web, October 18, 2014, http://thenextweb.com/dd/2014/10/18/privacy-internet-things-era-will-nsa-know-whats-fridge; Tom Sorell and Heather Draper, “Telecare, Surveillance, and the Welfare State,” American Journal of Bioethics 12, no. 9 (2012): 36–44, https://doi.org/10.1080/15265161.2012.699137; Christina DesMarais, “This Smartphone Tracking Tech Will Give You the Creeps,” PCWorld, May 22, 2012, http://www.pcworld.com/article/255802/new_ways_to_track_you_via_your_mobile_devices_big_brother_or_good_business_.html; Rhys Blakely, “‘We Thought Google Was the Future but It’s Becoming Big Brother,’” Times, September 19, 2014, http://www.thetimes.co.uk/tto/technology/internet/article4271776.ece; CPDP Conferences, Technological Totalitarianism, Politics and Democracy, 2016, http://www.internet-history.info/media-library/mediaitem/2389-technological-totalitarianism-politics-and-democracy.html; Julian Assange, “The Banality of ‘Don’t Be Evil,’” New York Times, June 1, 2013, https://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/02/opinion/sunday/the-banality-of-googles-dont-be-evil.html; Julian Assange, “Julian Assange on Living in a Surveillance Society,” New York Times, December 4, 2014, https://www.nytimes.com/2014/12/04/opinion/julian-assange-on-living-in-a-surveillance-society.html; Michael Hirsh, “We Are All Big Brother Now,” Politico, July 23, 2015, https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2015/07/big-brother-technology-trial-120477.html; “Apple CEO Tim Cook: Apple Pay Is Number One,” CBS News, October 28, 2014, http://www.cbsnews.com/news/apple-ceo-tim-cook-apple-pay-is-number-one; Mathias Döpfner, “An Open Letter to Eric Schmidt: Why We Fear Google,” FAZ.net, April 17, 2014, http://www.faz.net/1.2900860; Sigmar Gabriel, “Sigmar Gabriel: Political Consequences of the Google Debate,” Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, May 20, 2014, http://www.faz.net/aktuell/feuilleton/debatten/the-digital-debate/sigmar-gabriel-consequences-of-the-google-debate-12948701-p6.html; Cory Doctorow, “Unchecked Surveillance Technology Is Leading Us Towards Totalitarianism,” International Business Times, May 5, 2017, http://www.ibtimes.com/unchecked-surveillance-technology-leading-us-towards-totalitarianism-opinion-2535230; Martin Schulz, “Transcript of Keynote Speech at Cpdp2016 on Technological, Totalitarianism, Politics and Democracy,” Scribd, 2016, https://www.scribd.com/document/305093114/Keynote-Speech-at-Cpdp2016-on-Technological-Totalitarianism-Politics-and-Democracy. 2.

The Best of 2600: A Hacker Odyssey
by Emmanuel Goldstein
Published 28 Jul 2008

Fun with 802.11b at Kroger’s (Spring, 2003) By Kairi Nakatsuki This guide assumes you already have a working wardriving setup on a *nix machine. This isn’t necessarily meant to be a guide to hacking your friendly neighborhood Kroger’s location. Though I do hope that this information will be of use in case you stumble upon a Kroger’s location where an 802.11b network is present. Remember, don’t be evil children! Info The particular Kroger’s I did most of my dirty work at didn’t have a terribly great security model, as you might expect. Evidently, management doesn’t care much about their data being broadcast in clear text over the airwaves for 100 feet in every direction, though they seem to think that cloaking their ESSID would suffice.