the no-exit plan

how to stay in your job and be a fabulous, triumphant little scourge

hi tech support,

in the tech industry, the folk wisdom seems to be that everyone needs an “exit plan” and what i’m wondering lately is, if i want to “stay and fight” instead, how do i do that? i’ve started to touch code again in the last few weeks, and revisit ideas that i cast aside upon leaving university and joining google. this has caused me to realize that i allowed google to compromise my intellectual integrity. i denied legitimate interests because they didn’t fit into the way google does things, and it’s only now that i’m realizing that’s a problem not with me, but with google. I’ve been conceptualizing the rest of my career in tech as “a few more years of this shit and then i’m done”, but i don’t want to allow google to have done that to me. as i meet therapists many of whom have multiple gigs, i’m realizing there is a potential shape for my tech career that is very different than i would have been able to imagine as a googler.

i’m grateful for this sense of reclamation that i’ve begun to experience personally, but in line with alex hanna’s exhortation to develop our own institutional analyses, i find myself wondering what that reclamation might look like on an industrial level. in thinking about the countercultural roots of tech, i’ve been reminded of the notion of “queering spaces” – once we step out of capitalist realism, we realize that we have enormous collective power to stand up and say no to the hegemony of big tech and say yes to radical inclusion. “bring your whole self to work” was google’s big lie. i think there is room for radical ethics in tech, but we are going to need to level the playing field, and i am hopeful, as i believe you are, that that starts and ends with workers.

all best,

working in the end times

Ummmmm….haha….yeah. This is such a good question. It’s so big we can hang out in it. It’s giving Berkeley craftsman home with many books, much built-in shelving. The windows are open, there’s a breeze wafting, a cat snoozing in a slat of light on the wood floor. Someone notices there’s a dilapidated VW bus out front and is like “wait, whose is that?” Nobody knows. This house was last sold for like $350k to someone’s mom in ‘94 but soon it’ll belong to some tech asshole who’s prepared to pay $2M–maybe $2.5–in an all-cash deal. But we’re not worrying about that right now. Maybe we’re that future owner tech asshole, and the first item of business is gonna be calling someone to do something about that VW bus! (The second item of biz is a new backsplash *mimes shooting hoops*). But right now let’s just sit on these zabutons and and watch the clouds (is there a skylight? ok sure, there’s a skylight) and chiiiiiiiiiiiiiill….Eventually someone’s like “hey, it starts and ends with workers?” and we nod politely. But then they say it again, more assured this time, and then we all join in, chanting it, softly at first, then stronger: itstartsandendswithworkers, itstartsandendswithworkers, itstartsandendswith….

I’m stalling here and I’m sorry about that. As my 2.75 year old son, Felix, would say, I’m a little scared (to quote him more precisely, “I a widdle sared”….wow, I’m still stalling!). The question of “staying to fight the power” has dogged me in different forms for some time. For one, because, um, I didn’t do that? (3+ years post-Goog, my days are so random and untethered from hierarchy that if I vlogged my life, it would shock the readership). For two, the pandemic + the ways that Big Tech Bosses changed culture to de-accommodate #organizingvibes has done funky things to what was/is the “tech worker movement.” It fragmented more than it grew these past years, I’d say, as a noted tech worker movement analyst/stay-at-home mom. Many of the people I know who were willing to be “challenging,” or “hold power to account” in the wide gamut of situations where friction is good and necessary have left or been resignated (in a years-long process of “evaporative cooling,” as Irenes memorably called it). The ones that stayed are most likely shutting up to secure the bag and/or health insurance for dependents. What makes people fight? What makes people care enough to risk their livelihood? When is it effective? When is it worth it? In the absence of some big project/movement/momentum to plug into, is it just all individual calculations and decisions over and over again? These aren’t the questions you’re asking, and yet….and yet….

In the spring, I was supposed to be on a panel for Harvard students weighing possible careers in Big Tech: ethical considerations to make before accepting a job, how to bring your “private conscience” into a public company, etc. The existence/frame of the panel was stunning to me, because when I was a college senior 15 years ago, the most simplistic form of careerism reigned: get a job in finance or management consulting, be a good underling, collect “six figs,” no further questions! My (albeit lesser, the least) Ivy League school, Penn, convulsed in ecstatic pride that Google came to do a big push of college recruiting. Now the biggest kahuna institution of all, Harvard, is like “are you srsly going to sell your soul that easy, bro???” (we’re gently putting to the side all the internal contradictions of this including but not limited to Harvard being the literal founding place of Meta née Facebook….but of course no offense, Mr. Harvard, sir, you rule, please have me back anytime [and anyway, I never made it there at all because I got covid that week—classic 2020s situation!]!!) The rapid nosedive of popular sentiment vis a vis “The Valley” plus Gen Z’s rumored horniness for justice/ethics/purpose has to open up some new opportunities and possibilities…right?? RIGHT????

Right. But strategies and tactics. We need those. Badly, and like yesterday! What happened next is that I took your question over to Alex Hanna (why am I writing this out like a little knowledge quest? I’m huffing and puffing through the paragraphs, we are out of newsletter SHAPE, honey….). Alex is a former senior ethical AI researcher at Google (now with Timnit & co at the DAIR institute) and a radical ethics-haver with sage witch pillar-of-community vibes. Surely she’d be able to fill in the picture of “How Should a Person Be? (corporate tech dystopian edition)”!

She sure did. Alex’s wisdom was two-fold: 1/ treat the time you stay as an ethnographic exercise. Working in tech is a kind of participant observation, she said. Studying the layers of bureaucracy and the worst ghouls of management—which you can see more clearly when you really get in there and make complaints and become an ear for others and a loving departmental killjoy, shoutout Sara Ahmed forever—is work, it’s empirical, it will come in handy someday, trust! 2/ it may not be full-on revolution or “reclamation at the industrial level,” but there are possibilities for resistance in pockets everywhere. “No institution is completely hegemonic,” she said, (to which I was like “oh hell yeah!?!” which gives depressing insight into my state of mind/underlying assumption that Google-esque monoliths ARE completely hegemonic). She recommended reading the late, wonderful Erik Olin Wright’s writing on real utopias—one of his modes of change is “interstitial transformation,” relatively small and subtle ruptures within organizations that ultimately add up to a shift in the system. Ding ding ding! This is about as fulsome a theory of change as you’re gonna find to buoy you through this cold/soulless/atomized season of tech, methinks. I’m reminded of the “Group of Nine” elite Google engineers who refused to build the air gap technology that splintered government data onto separate servers, which jammed up the stupid villain federal security stuff Google was doing then. Interstitial transformation alert! (Group of Nine folks: “come on the pod,” etc!!). Little struggles, little resistances, little moments of “doing an ethics” add up to invisible changes we probably won’t see for decades but are nevertheless worth the immediate risk to your “six figs” which is fine because guess what, you hated your job anyway. Win, lose, win-win!

As I get older/cornier/more drawn to a long mystical view of life (today is in fact my 37th birthday AND the opening of the lion’s gate portal so get out there and manifest abundance, gals!), my main advice is to work on being more integrated (new age jargon alert!). You’re already on this tip in ways I absolutely wasn’t during my time at Google so congrats on that. I recently read a very useful book by Marshall Rosenberg called Non-Violent Communication which specifically calls out “corporate managers” as a sub-type of person who really struggles with staying in touch with their own thoughts/feelings/values in situations of hierarchy and domination. If you’re going to “stay and fight,” I think the main idea is hang on tight to your integrity and sense of responsibility to yourself and the world and so on, blah blah (now I’m hearing my 5 year old roll his eyes and be like “we KNOW that!”). Don’t be a good underling! This is literally the foundation for seeing what’s fucked up out/in there, for building the courage to challenge it, and for inspiring others to do the same.

So in conclusion, change may start and end with workers, but first it starts and ends with YOU (*vaudeville hook violently pulls me offstage*).

stay safe out there,

claire

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