The Google Memo and the responses to it I’ve seen, from Left and Right, all seem to tacitly acknowledge the same four points:
- There are a lot of macho jerks in tech.
- Women, in general, would rather not be surrounded by macho jerks.
- Macho jerks, in general, like to pose as the enforcers of the prevailing orthodoxy, regardless of the content of that orthodoxy.
- Therefore, the fact that the prevailing orthodoxy within Google is nominally feminist does not in fact reduce the amount of Asshole that the women working there have to put up with.
The controversy all takes the form of commentary on these four points. The author of the memo argues that point #1 is a result of biological necessity. Whole regions of the Internet exist only to dwell on apparent exceptions to point #2, and some of the author’s defenders show the influence of this. In response to point #3, libertarians and other pro-capitalist types defend enforcement of orthodoxy by saying that a business isn’t a debating society, and an employee who takes it upon himself to publish a piece arguing that his company’s shares are overvalued can only expect to be fired. And as to point #4, there is controversy about whether a different kind of feminism or a different way of inculcating it would address the problem.
Something else that’s struck me about the whole affair is that it’s a failure of the center-right media. For years, rightists of all stripes have regarded Google as an adversary. Surely some right-wing publication could have sent a reporter to look into Google’s corporate ethos, and have found James Damore. Mr (or is it Dr?) Damore could then have unburdened himself to that reporter without fear of being fired.
There are those who suspect that Mr Damore’s memo was an attempt to provoke precisely the reaction he has in fact received, complete with his public firing by Google’s CEO, so that he can make a new career as a right-wing political spokesman. That seems unlikely to me; the longer he spent at Google, the more opportunities Mr Damore would likely have had to launch new ventures of whatever kind he might like, including right-wing political projects. After all, Steve Bannon didn’t attain his current position by getting himself fired after his first year at Goldman Sachs. And Year One of the Trump Era would hardly seem like a propitious moment to begin a career as a right-wing pundit. But who knows, maybe Mr Damore wasn’t working out at Google and saw a fiery exit at this time as his best option.
