Dystopian tales of that time when I sold out to Google

Summary

I will do something I normally never do here, and make my first ever blog post on the topic of, long sigh: tech. I’ve already talked about Google a number of times on Mastodon which is, blessedly, by design, not discoverable; but I’ve decided to commit the full story to print. Hopefully this won't come back to bite me in the ass but eh it’s the apocalypse, who cares at this point. At least Wordsmith Dot Social is half-abandoned and has no comment system, so I won’t have to deal with techbros batting for billionaires or preaching the power of Open Source (™ Open Source Initiativeⓡ). But if you clicked this, Dear Reader, then you wanted the tea; and I am nothing if not forthcoming with tea-spilling. The fact that Google fired me with shut-up money only makes it more fun to do it. So go get some chamomile and sit comfortably, for this is an old woman reminiscing; let’s talk about capitalism and anarchism, about the precariat and surveillance, plush dolls and churrascarias and gay argots; let us go back in time and space, and journey to tropical Brazil in the distant time of 2007… 1. Treason 2007 wasn’t a good year to start a new career, as it turned out. Google back then prided itself on broadcasting its Best Place To Work award, won year after year after year. Younger people will have trouble picturing this, but Google used to nurture an image of being the “good one” among megacorps; they championed open standards (except when they didn’t), supported open source projects (until they backstabbed them), and used language that corporate wasn’t supposed to use, like “don’t be evil” (until they, infamously and in a true dark comedy move, retracted that motto). The work environment was all colourful, nerdy cool, not a single necktie in sight—this was seen as brave and refreshing rather than cringe and tired, you see. And they made a big deal out of something called “20% time”: Every engineer was promised 1/5 of their work time for themselves, to do anything they want. (Goog...