https://t.ly/GByeFromZora (capitals matter here!)
Dear Coworkers,
I am sorry for being out of touch for so long. It is mostly my fault here: I knew people still at the company willing to share a letter, and most of you don’t have my personal contact info. I do want to stay in touch, I just knew I had to write about the reason for my firing, and wanted to take a little time to be in a less reactionary frame of mind.
I’ve been all right. I had been organizing at the company on and off since Project Maven in 2018, so I realized a long time ago that I was at odds with leadership, and have savings to not immediately need work. I don’t have the kind of money where I’ll never need to work again, but hopefully I can eventually find my way into a role that better aligns with my values.
I joined Google eight and a half years ago, to work on a team surfacing hurricane and other disaster alerts, hoping some of those would save lives. It’s a sad book-end to my career that Google AI, possibly including some of my own work, is almost surely being used to kill people.
I was a teenager around the time of the Iraq War. The people in power lied and lied and lied, told us that our biggest threat was WMDs, Saddam Hussein, Iraq, brown people in general. It became clear our leaders mostly wanted to profit from oil, and the instability and desperation that they brought. The way I see it, 9/11 was an opportunity to them.
I see parallels between the Iraq War and the genocide in Gaza. Many Israeli leaders have made it clear they want the land [link], and don’t plan on withdrawing troops for any reason, including the ones they claimed as justifications for the invasion [link]. Israeli soldiers’ social media shows joy in violence like the Abu Ghraib abuses, feasting before dropping bombs on Gaza [link]. But–at least for me, unlike the Iraq War, we’ve had war crimes streamed to our phones for the last several months [lots of links on every word here]. And unlike the Iraq War, AI is being used extensively. The +972 report on Lavender and “Where’s Daddy?”, and The Gospel earlier, highlights the use of machine learning to automate killing people. These are systems which use AI to rank people, detect when they return home, and bomb them with drones. AI is also used to maintain a system of apartheid, where in occupied territories Palestinians have an inferior legal status and cannot use certain roads, need to go through security checkpoints, and are constantly surveilled. Amnesty International’s Automated Apartheid report describes the Blue Wolf app, which gamifies surveillance by encouraging IDF soldiers to capture as many Palestinians’ faces as they can, which are later used in targeting them for raids, and worse.
You’ve probably heard about Project Nimbus, the $1.2B contract between Amazon and Google with the Israeli military and government. As with previous military contracts, Google has repeatedly lied, denying military use even after a TIME Magazine article revealed Google had signed a recent $1M consultation contract (at a 15% discount) to the Israeli Ministry of Defense, as part of the larger Project Nimbus contract. The Intercept further revealed that the Israeli government’s Settlement Division, as well as leading weapons manufacturers Israel Aerospace Industries and Rafael Advanced Defense Systems are required to use Project Nimbus for their cloud compute needs. A later WIRED article revealed that Google is pitching Gemini models to Israeli police and national security officials.
For a while, to be honest I didn’t respond to this well: I was dismissive and made excuses to not engage. I was burned out from previous organizing. I had let red lines be crossed before, being aware of the $9B JWCC contract, which arguably is building similar capacity for violence as Project Nimbus. I also had a childhood friend in Israel; we’d lost touch years ago, but I think part of me was anxious about some imagined sense of betrayal on his part.
But eventually, I read the +972 article on Lavender and “Where’s Daddy?”, and by “read” I more mean sat with the gravity of what is happening, than memorizing random facts or quotes from the article. Buddhist teachings say that the mind naturally wants to push away pain, and seek pleasure; I certainly find this to be true for myself. In this case, even after I stop completely ignoring the atrocities, my mind often becomes consumed in emotion, fantasy, or nihilistic hopelessness and despair. These are “easy outs” from discomfort, which end up fostering delusion.
I urge you to engage in a process of inquiry as well. What does it mean for people to be treated in this way? To be killed in this way? For your work and tax dollars and such to be used for this greater project? It can be sad and painful to open yourself up to others’ suffering, when you start to see the so many ways we have been conditioned to devalue their lives.
I don’t urge you to respond in a particular way. For me, I still had a few organizer friends at the company, and got plugged in to NoTA, halfheartedly at first. (Besides organizing burnout, I also had a lot of extracurriculars and was working effectively 60-80% time.) I left some flyers in MKs talking about Mai Ubeid’s death; it was sobering to notice how nervous I was to take that small step compared to what I was willing to do in the past, how the company’s 2019 firings and mass layoffs were effective means of control. I eventually got bolder; the excuses I made to dismiss the violence and my role in it started to break down. “Someone else would just do it”—Google is a leader in AI; Oracle was rejected from Project Nimbus because they didn’t have enough AI offerings. “They’re just using AI as an excuse”—even if a primary purpose of generative AI ends up being whitewashing the genocide, by saying they’re targeting Hamas, and any “mistakes” are the AI’s fault, it’s still bad. “But both sides are killing civilians”—even without a deeper analysis, my work is not being used by Hamas. “But I’m working on an open-source project”—that wasn’t all of my work, and Google was paying me because it could get profit from my labor. I eventually lost track of the number of news stories I saw about hospitals and refugee camps being bombed, now loudly and proudly. The endless stories of starvation, mass graves, detention camps, prisoner torture. I wanted no part in it. I tabled at the cafes for a few months, organized one of the lunches, and took part in the sit-in in Thomas Kurian’s office.
Going in to the action, I was prepared to get fired, but after it happened I was like “well, I guess I’m probably not fired”. I was fired the next day, and by Friday, Google had fired 50 people, many of whom were not even part of the sit-in. I feel like a fool for not expecting them to fire so many people to send a message, even if it seems a bit obvious in retrospect. We tried to take care of each other, even though folks panicked a bit.
There’s a sobering reality that we were all aware of, that the sit-in wasn’t going to stop the violence on a time scale relevant for the genocide in Gaza. It’s hard to engage when you don’t have the power to win (for example, get Google to drop Project Nimbus, stop harassment of Muslim, Arab, and Palestinian coworkers, or even allow us to speak more freely without retaliation). But it felt good to do something, in light of the active participation in the genocide by both mainstream parties in the US, the extreme level of censorship by American media, or for that matter the community moderation team at Google. I hope that eventually power is built to challenge the current authority, and that our action helps expose Google’s wrongdoings.
I’m glad to be out. There are of course some stresses to not having an income, having my career dumpstered, and having to figure out what I want to do with this next chapter in my life … but these are overshadowed by no longer having the moral stress of being at Google. It was really, really hard to be at the company. I am not going to go all the way to say work is an abusive relationship, but Google certainly deploys many abuser techniques: lying over and over and over, gaslighting, reverse-victim-offender, emotional manipulation and control on many levels, like telling people they’re special and then treating them disposably. It’s been nice to have most of my social connection just be with my friends, and spend most of my time doing things I enjoy.
I did enjoy working with many of you on a technical and intellectual level, and I took a lot of pride in my work. Perhaps I need to let go of the pride eventually. But I am nevertheless grateful for all of the professional opportunities that you all gave me, and the leeway to explore modeling research. Some of you know, despite all the harms of the tech industry, I do actually love programming. I will need to find a next gig eventually, and I would appreciate your support / recommendations as I navigate that. I would of course be willing to give recommendations to you as well, if my status of being fired doesn’t backfire.
Take care,
Zora