They’re still in Kurian’s office, still streaming, and starting to get major media coverage: WaPo Wired
In my opinion this is one of the most important labor developments in the US in a while. Internationally politicized worker organization in the belly of the beast by traditionally un-unionizable PMCs.
e: finally arrested after 10 hours
Having talked to a lot of co-workers about Google’s tech being used to cause harm, the huge majority sentiment I’ve gotten is that workers don’t actually care what they build. They just wanna get the money and climb the career ladder unfortunately
They’ve also displayed a lot of libertarian free market sentiment of they don’t actually hold any social responsibility for what they’ve built, and that it’s only the fault of the people using Google’s tech to do bad things
I might work with weirdos but my (non-Google) tech coworkers have been generally receptive and don’t want to build actively harmful/misleading/buggy stuff. It’s kind of a natural outgrowth of quality-focused work. When I talk to blue-collar union members I’m struck by how proud they are of their jobs. I think that everyone wants to be doing meaningful things for the 8 hours a day we spend working, it must just be buried real deep in some of the Valley ideology people.
Having worked at a large variety of tech companies, I think it’s just largely a self-selection type of stuff. People who work at the most highly paid and most “prestigious” workplaces self-select themselves to be people who only care about the money and social status, especially since these companies require the most studying to get into
I’ve shared your experiences with other “non-prestigious” companies where people do care a lot more about their work and really just anything other than material goods/money
My current co-workers are the most devoid of interest in the arts, sociology, psychology, really anything related to human expression and condition I’ve ever seen