For months, Google employees have led a campaign demanding that the company terminate its contract with the Pentagon for Project Maven, a program that uses machine learning to improve targeting for drone strikes. Nearly five thousand Google workers signed an internal petition to cancel the project, and dozens resigned.
Last Friday, the workers won. Google announced that it will not seek another contract for Project Maven, caving to employee pressure. The about-face is a big win against US militarism, and reflects the new political currents that have been developing within the tech industry since Donald Trump’s election.
Ben Tarnoff recently spoke to one of the Google workers who helped lead the campaign (and, for the purposes of this interview, goes by the pseudonym Kim). They discussed how the campaign got started, how it grew, and what lessons it holds for future organizing in the tech industry.
Can you explain the origins of the campaign? How did this get started?
As soon as Google signed the Project Maven contract, there was internal dissent. It started around September 2017, and picked up speed in October. By January 2018, at least a dozen different teams knew about Project Maven. A group of Googlers from several different parts of the company — cloud, AI, communications, the Google Brain team, and DeepMind, among others — strongly objected to it. They got together and tried to raise their concerns through official channels and to Diane Greene, the head of Google Cloud.
But the company’s human resources and ethics compliance teams dismissed those concerns. Within a couple months, it was clear the Googlers’ efforts weren’t going anywhere. The company was moving full steam ahead with the project. So they decided to take a different approach. They posted about Project Maven on the company’s internal social media platform, explaining the project and outlining their concerns.
Their post got a ton of responses. The employee reaction was very strong against Project Maven. Diane Greene stepped in, trying to tamp down the concern by insisting that Project Maven was for strictly non-offensive purposes. But people weren’t persuaded, and many of them directly challenged Diane in their comments.
Did the overwhelming response from other employees come as a surprise?
Definitely. But after seeing that response, the Googlers who wrote the post felt empowered. They saw that they had a lot of internal support. So they helped assemble an open letter to Sundar Pichai, Google’s CEO, asking him to cancel the Project Maven contract, and shared it internally.
What was the response like?
It only got a hundred signatures that night. But the next day, it exploded. In less than twenty-four hours, it got a thousand signatures.
That day, we had an all-hands meeting. There was a special announcement from Diane Greene, responding to employee criticism of Project Maven. She wasn’t prepared, and the response wasn’t assuring.
Then, during the Q&A period, several of the questions were about Project Maven. Leadership got hammered. This was totally unplanned, and I don’t think anyone expected such a forceful employee response. One woman stood up and said something like, “Hey, I left the Defense Department so I wouldn’t have to work on this kind of stuff. What kind of voice do we have besides this Q&A to explain why this project is not okay?”
Sergey Brin, one of Google’s cofounders, responded first. And his response really paid us dividends. He said something like, “Letting you ask that question is the voice that you have. Very few companies would allow you to do that.”
That’s completely true, actually. Google has a more open internal culture than many other companies. There is an established tradition of critiquing company decisions. But his remark came across as tone deaf and out of touch to almost every Googler who heard it.
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