“The politics of Google has been in the spotlight since the online giant seemingly fired an employee for challenging liberal orthodoxy,” Paul Bond reports for The Hollywood Reporter. “It’s a situation tailor-made for Sabo, and the conservative street artist struck before the sun rose on Friday, plastering the Venice area of Los Angeles, all around some offices where Google and its YouTube unit reside, with disparaging posters in some very hard-to-reach areas.”
“The posters, some of them exceedingly large and very high up, some plastered onto bus-stop benches, some behind glass looking like official advertisements, contrast Google with Apple, distorting the latter’s catchphrase to suggest that thinking different at Google won’t produce world-changing products, it will get you fired,” Bond reports. “The controversy that Sabo is exploiting concerns Google’s vp of diversity, integrity and governance Danielle Brown publicly chastising an employee who wrote a memo chastising Google for what he thinks is an obsession with diversity.”
“In Sabo’s artwork, Pichai’s image appears alongside the image of Apple co-founder Steve Jobs, and both logos from the tech giants are also present,” Bond reports. “In some posters, Apple’s tagline ‘Think Different’ is alongside Google’s logo with the text ‘Not So Much.’ In other posters, it’s alleged that thinking different gets you hired at Apple but fired at Google.”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: This artwork is incisive, but ultimately flawed. We know for a fact that there are employees at Apple who keep their political, religious, economic, and other views under wraps because the corporate climate is not welcoming and they fear being ostracized or worse. So, casting Apple as the white knight here glosses over the pervasiveness of the issues of political correctness, groupthink and the like. In a truly open environment, you’d see ideas from across the spectrum being discussed without fear of reprisal. At Apple and, obviously, Google and many other places of employment, this is sadly not the case. Apple and many other companies most certainly have ideological echo chambers, too.
This is not to excuse Google. Far from it. Apple is simply not in the clear here, either.
Think Different, indeed.
• I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it. ― S.G. Tallentyre
• I got a feeling about political correctness. I hate it. It causes us to lie silently instead of saying what we think. — Hal Holbrook
• If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear. ― George Orwell
Former Google engineer James Damore’s original memo, “Google’s Ideological Echo Chamber,” can be read in full here.
SEE ALSO:
James Damore: Why I was fired by Google – August 12, 2017
Here’s why the tech industry doesn’t need more female software engineers – August 9, 2017
[Thanks to MacDailyNews readers too numerous to mention individually for the heads up.]