Now, perhaps, we’ll start to realise that tech bosses are just as calculating and ruthless as bankers
THE only surprise about yesterday’s walkout by Google staff in Dublin in protest at the company’s treatment of women is that it has taken so long. Those at the coalface of the tech industry surely have known this a lot longer than the rest of us, and surely know something even more worrying: the firms they work for, and the people who own and run them, are not very nice at all.
Google was founded only 20 years ago by Larry Page and Sergey Brin, and it revolutionised how we searched for information. Instead of ploughing through endless pages looking for what we needed, Google presented it all on a platter and, like Hoover or Jeep, it became shorthand. We no longer ‘search’ – we just Google.
The other dominant player, Facebook, was launched by Mark Zuckerberg and four of his Harvard University friends in 2004. Zuckerberg is a timid man in public. At US Congressional hearings earlier this year, he sat in a slightly too big suit that made him look like the kid in Big after he stopped being Tom Hanks, and he almost painfully conforms to everything we all believe geeks to be. Even his first project, a site called Facemash, played into the narrative of the revenge of the nerds, because it was launched in response to a romantic rejection.
Cruel
Facemash cruelly placed photos of college students next to each other in twos, and asked users to vote for which was better looking. It was an early warning of just how little Zuckerberg cared, and cares, for privacy and personal feeling, and in a blog at the time, he went even further. ‘I almost want to put some of these faces next to pictures of some farm animals and have people vote on which is the more attractive,’ he wrote.
In the tech world, Zuck (as the fanboys call him), and Page and Brin, became superstars. So too, on the hardware side, did Steve Jobs of Apple, one of the most innovative and brilliantly creative minds of the age who launched the Apple I and Apple II computers, both of which actually were designed and built by cofounder Steve Wozniak. Jobs’s gift was marketing, making us crave products that in truth often were technologically inferior to those of rivals.
These men were a new kind of executive, always dressed down in jeans and Tshirts or, in Jobs’s case, turtleneck sweaters. Theirs was presented as an egalitarian leap into the future, delivering products that would connect us as never before. They were benevolent purveyors of community in a fragmenting world, one in which anyone – acquaintances of years or total strangers – could become your friend. It was like Barney for adults.
How ironic, then, that none of them comes across as the sort of man with whom you would wish to be friends, especially since Zuckerberg’s principal talent seems to have been a disconcerting ability to shaft his own mates.
The first to fall were the admittedly gullible Winklevoss twins, Cameron and Tyler. They hired Zuckerberg to write the computer code for ConnectU, a social networking site they had been developing for almost two years. While dragging his heels completing the task, Zuckerberg registered the domain name thefacebook.com, and told his best friend Eduardo Saverin to start thinking about ways to market it. The Winklevosses naturally protested at what they saw as the theft of their idea, and after lawsuits and counterclaims, eventually received a reported $65milllion settlement.
Saverin perhaps should have paid closer attention because he was next in the firing line. He stayed on the East Coast while Zuckerberg travelled to California and, feeling left out, he froze Facebook’s bank account. Zuckerberg started a new company to buy the old firm, diluted the shares Saverin owned, then unfriended him. Again, don’t shed too many tears – Saverin relinquished his US citizenship, moved to Singapore and has watched his ‘diluted’ shareholding mushroom to around $11billion (€9.6billion).
Offensive
Nor has Zuckerberg shown any real enthusiasm for keeping the platform free from false or offensive conduct. As was conclusively shown in the recent Channel 4 Despatches programme, covertly filmed in Dublin at company moderating content on behalf of Facebook, oversight seems as if it just is a window-dressing exercise to assuage regulators. A video of a child being beaten by his stepfather was allowed stay on the platform, yet if a woman puts up an image of herself breastfeeding a newborn, it is pulled.
As for the ascetic guru Steve Jobs, he denied for years he was the father of Lisa Brennan, born to an early girlfriend, despite a paternity test that confirmed the likelihood at almost 95%. Even after he became a millionaire in the 1980s, he paid only $500 a month in maintenance though before his death they had reconciled and he left her a multi-millionaire. Hers was a difficult childhood though. As she said recently: ‘Clearly I was not compelling enough for my father, this incredible man, to unequivocally own. I would think was I an ugly baby?’ A year after her birth, he called a new computer on which he was working the Lisa, then spent 20 years pretending it was a coincidence. He even stopped paying her Harvard fees after the first year, and left it to wealthy neighbours to step in.
Wozniak, the genius who made Apple possible, maintains he and Jobs never exactly fell out, but their friendship lessened in intensity, and Wozniak left to work on other projects, though he remains on Apple’s payroll as the firm’s first employee and receives around $120,000 a year. There was, however, a massive disparity in their net worth – when Jobs died his estate was valued at just over $10billion. Wozniak is no pauper with his $100million fortune.
Protest
As for Google, yesterday’s protest came in the wake of the revelation that the company fired 48 employees in the past two years after they were accused of sexual harassment. Andy Rubin, the creator of Google’s Android software for mobile phones and tablets, left the firm with a payoff of $90million, and continues to deny the allegations made against him.
The proper place for Mr Rubin to establish his innocence beyond all doubt is in a court of law, but that is not possible in the world of Google. Instead, the firm demands that accuser and accused submit to an in-house arbitration process.
Page and Brin no doubt started out fired with idealism. Since 2000, the code of conduct issued to employees contained the motto ‘Don’t be evil’, explaining that ‘it’s built around the recognition that everything we do in connection with our work at Google will be, and should be, measured against the highest possible standards of ethical business conduct’. Earlier this year, it was removed .
Looking at these men, it is hard, even 50 years after the research was conducted, to argue with the conclusion of psychologists William Cannon and Dallis Perry, who were enlisted to profile mostly male computer programmers in an attempt to establish the qualities common to the best candidates. What they came up was chilling, and remains so. They found that these were men ‘who don’t like people – they dislike activities involving close personal interaction; they are generally more interested in things than in people’.
In summary, they are detached. They see you and me not as part of the spurious communities they claim to create, but as fodder serving up personal information that can be financially exploited in a way that might give a rapacious banker, oil baron or steel king of old cause to pause. So, no, not nice people at all.