Pleroma

Pleroma

Richard Moss MossRC
I remember when a Google Australia engineer came to speak to my computer science class in 2009 or 2010. He sold us an impossible vision of a Utopian workplace, and we bought it. Nobody thought of the devil's bargain; we all dreamed of working there post-graduation.
https://www.osnews.com/story/142532/dystopian-tales-of-that-time-when-i-sold-out-to-google/
If you ever wanted to know what it was like to be an engineer at Google during the early to late 2000s, here you go. "Now even though Google is fundamentally a spyware advertising company (some 80% of its revenue is advertising; the proportion was even higher back then), we Engineers were kept carefully away from that reality, as much as meat eaters are kept away from videos of the meat industry: don't think about it, just enjoy your steak. If you think about it it will stop being enjoyable, so we just churned along, pretending to work for an engineering company rather than for a giant machine with the sole goal of manipulating people into buying cruft. The ads and business teams were on different floors, and we never talked to them." « Elilla Even back then, Google knew full well that what they were doing and working towards was deeply problematic and ethically dubious, at best, and reading about how young, impressionable Google engineers at the time figured that out by themselves is kind of heartbreaking. In those days, Google tried really hard to cultivate an image of being different than Apple or Microsoft, a place...
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[tj] - knows what your packets are thinking tj@altelectron.org.uk
@MossRC maybe it’s better to link to the original blog rather than some spam site https://wordsmith.social/elilla/deep-in-mordor-where-the-shadows-lie-dystopian-stories-of-my-time-as-a-googler

Richard Moss MossRC
@tj OSnews has too many ads, but it's hardly a spam site. I thought their post did well to pull out the essence from a long and meandering story, and it provided all the context necessary for my comment. But I agree with your sentiment that people should read the original blog to learn the full story.