During a presentation by an executive with Google’s Israel branch on Monday, a Google Cloud engineer stood up and shouted, “I refuse to build technology that powers genocide or surveillance.” They were later fired.
https://www.theverge.com/2024/3/8/24094687/google-israel-project-nimbus-employee-fired
Hey, we’re talking about it. Maybe it will inspire others to do the same.
I doubt there’s anybody in America past elementary school that hasn’t already talked about Gaza. If you want a protest to work, it has to apply some form of pressure. An easily replaced engineer with thousands of people lined up for his job quitting is not doing that. It just makes people that are already progressive on the issue feel better, which accomplishes zilch, except profit-generating clicks for news articles.
If he was talking about the Sudanese civil war or something that might be a different story. Not Gaza though.
Go ahead and describe what exactly he should have done to make an effective protest. In the meantime, consider that perhaps he simply did not want to be a cog in a genocidal machine as he clearly stated.
I meant we’re talking about him taking a stand.
Look, I respect the guy for having the right opinion. But that’s not good enough in the real world. Never was, it takes more than that. If just being a decent fellow was enough to fix problems, we’d have fixed them all already.
Harder decisions are required, it’s not easy. If he’d have leaked something, or maybe gotten himself fired for simply not-disruptively speaking out and sued or something, or organized a walk-out or whatever, that’d be admirable.
This kind of “oh people on the internet are gonna like this” move is just immature though. It doesn’t do jack shit. Standing up isn’t good enough, just gets your fucking head blown off. That’s just how the world works. Entrenched power isn’t some dumb pushover, otherwise generations of activists would have pushed it over already.
You sure do seem to have it all figured out… 🙄
It’s easier to sniff out nice-sounding bullshit than it is to find actual progress.