(Almost all of the bold titles are from this infamous Google memo.)

Google has a political bias!

No shit. It might be related to the thousands of dollars it spends on electoral campaigns.

Google’s bias has created a politically correct monoculture.

As someone who has spent a handful on months inside a Google office as a an intern, I can confirm. The cultural bias inside Google is overwhelming, it is imposed with tremendous energy from the top levels, through courses, seminars, events, CEO speeches — that everybody is encouraged to watch–or the use of biased words to describe everything.

Biased words?

Did you know that inside Google is typical to use the adjective “googley” to indicate something good, and “un-googley” to indicate anything that is bad?

Fuck. Really?

Yes. But let’s not get distracted.

Google bias is a left bias.

Affirming this may have sense only in the ideological neo-liberal, right-wing mayhem that we live in.

More men may like coding because it requires systemizing. And women have lower stress tolerance. They work on front end, which deals with people. We need to stop assuming that gender gaps imply sexism.

Ok, sorry. I forgot the main enemy of neo-liberalism right now, fascism. By the way, you know that coding was culturally perceived as a women job at some point in history, right? Margaret Hamilton, rings a bell?

Memo’s ideology is not fascism!

Ok, I’ll call it alt-right, it’s more fashionable.

Stop alienating conservatives!

Still, I don’t think equality should be up for debate. Probably, we did not alienate conservatives enough in WW2. ​

Alt-right is different than fascism.

Ok, that’s not entirely wrong. Alt-right’s cultural background lies on 4chan, on reddit’s Red Pill, on the internet MRA communities, on /r/thedonald, not in the military and the noblemen. They have taken all the Internet’s South Park libertarianism, a bit of the worst of capitalist classical liberalism ideology, added some suburban resentment towards minorities and women and — BAM! — they elected this guy.

It is difficult to realize it now that they are in the White House, but all of the Alt-right’s cultural background arrives from the same virtual and real places from which we, coders, arrive from. 4chan and reddit. Computer science campuses. MMORPG chats. It’s very very hard to think of them as a “separate body” in a huge tech corporation like Google or Facebook. Especially considering that many of their core values — stuff like “it’s the poor fault if they are poor” — are the same as those big corporations. You can read them as “it’s not a monopoly, we are just the best” if you like.

If you agree with this, please just close this window.

This silencing has created an ideological echo chamber where some ideas are too sacred to be honestly discussed.

That is the point of any cultural system, setting some base for discussion without having to prove, every time, that yes, not only white males can code. But, in this particular case, there are other sacred ideas: for example, that it is possible to make a shitload of money without doing any bad to anyone (one of the cornerstone of Google’s training for interns).

I know this is not the case at hand, but is saying that there cannot be any well-mannered mega-corporation “extremism”? I guess so, right? 😢

I agree that we might ask ourselves if is it really OK that we consider normal for corporations now to have a cultural system. I mean, they need to do that to preserve their interests, but are we ok with that? I am assuming we all know that their interests might not be exactly our own.

The lack of discussion fosters the most extreme and authoritarian elements of this ideology.

The idea that everything can be discussed, even the (average) human traits — such as “higher openness to ideas” (for men, obviously) and “higher neuroticism” (for women, sure) — is terrible. It’s not only terrible: it is the by-product of the ideology that everything will be better through competition and survival of the fittest, even core human values. And I guess that is the true meeting point of neo-liberalism and the alt-right.

Affirmative action is unfair, divisive, and bad for business.

That may even be. That’s why the opinion of a corporation should not even be listened.

For each of these changes, we need principled reasons for why it helps Google; that is, we should be optimizing for Google.

I have nothing to add, your honor.