Keen On America

“There is a big chasm between defeat and surrender. Surrender is inherently a political decision.” — James M. Scott
 
Exactly eighty-one years ago, on August 9, 1945, the United States dropped its second nuclear device on Nagasaki. Three days earlier, on August 6, the Enola Gay dropped the first bomb on Hiroshima. Little Boy and Fat Man. Our nuclear Rubicon had been crossed.
 
Three days in August that changed the world. These historic 72 hours are the subject of Empire of Ashes: Truman, Hirohito, and the Descent into Total War, by James M. Scott, America’s foremost chronicler of the Pacific War. This new book, Scott reveals, grew out of Black Snow, his history of the firebombing of Tokyo. But whereas Black Snow was a military study, he explains, Empire of Ashes focuses on Truman, Hirohito and the politics of nuclear warfare. By August 1945, Scott argues, Japan was already defeated. So surrender was a political decision — one that required a weak, figurehead emperor to summon the power to save his country from an even darker apocalypse.
 
Should America regret these August days? Harry Truman certainly didn’t, Scott notes. In fact, in 1958 Truman even held a press conference in Independence, Missouri, to fire back at Hiroshima’s city council when it suggested that he should. Nor does Scott render much of a moral verdict of his own. “Nobody needs to hear James Scott in Charleston, South Carolina tell you what it is you should think,” he explains, suggesting that we can all make up our minds by reading Empire of Ashes.
 
So two bombs, somewhere between 150,000 and 246,000 civilian deaths, and no crime? That, oddly enough, might be the biggest tragedy of those three days in August 1945 that changed the world forever.
 
Five Takeaways
 
•       Defeat Is Not Surrender. Scott’s organizing insight: as destructive as it was, the atomic bomb was inherently a political weapon, aimed at the chasm between a nation defeated and a nation willing to say so. Surrender is a political act — and Japan’s politics ran through Hirohito, ostensibly the center of political, cultural, and spiritual life, in practice a figurehead bypassed by militarists who had consolidated power through the 1920s and ’30s under the standing threat of assassination. His first peace soundings had to be conducted incognito, for fear of his own army; not until June 1945 does he rise to the occasion. Truman, by contrast, emerges as strong and morally serious — a First World War artillery officer who inherited the Okinawa bloodbath, approved the invasion of Japan, chose what he saw as the lesser evil, and then stopped all further atomic use the moment surrender came.
•       The Firebombing Precedent. Would FDR have made the same call? “Absolutely. No doubt about it.” The moral threshold had already been crossed on March 9, 1945, when Curtis LeMay abandoned precision bombing and burned Tokyo — 105,000 men, women, and children in a single night, the most destructive conventional raid in history. The Pentagon braced for public outrage, monitoring editorials, radio, and the floors of Congress. None came; Time wrote that “properly kindled, Japanese cities will burn like autumn leaves.” LeMay took the green light and burned 64 cities — 170 square miles — before the first atomic bomb ever fell. War Secretary Henry Stimson confessed his amazement to his diary; FDR, with every opportunity to rein it in, said nothing. When Elliott Roosevelt later claimed his father would never have dropped the bomb, Stimson publicly corrected him.
•       The Second Bomb Mattered More. Scott’s most counterintuitive argument: Nagasaki, not Hiroshima, ended the war. Atomic energy was the AI of its day — over a hundred academic papers in 1939 alone, new physics programs at Berkeley and Chicago, dreams of atom-powered ships — and Japan, which had its own failed program, knew exactly how ruinously expensive a bomb was to build. So after Hiroshima, the militarists reasoned the Americans could not possibly have another, and held to the plan of bleeding the invasion on the beaches for better terms. A second city destroyed seventy-five hours later shattered the illusion: if they can drop one every three days, they may have twenty — or two hundred. As for simply telling Tokyo? There were no channels beyond dropped leaflets and slow relays through neutral capitals. You could not, as Andrew noted, email in those days.
•       In the Room Where It Happened. Scott’s method — borrowed, he says, from Hamilton — is to put readers in the room: the White House, the Imperial Palace, and above all the streets. He has interviewed survivors in Tokyo, Hiroshima, and Nagasaki across multiple books, and the physics of the firestorm connects all three: heat that melts concrete, fuses coins into lumps, welds roof tiles to kitchenware. Only five photographs were taken in Hiroshima on the day of the blast — stunned people, sitting. Organized rescue took thirty hours to arrive. In Nagasaki, the thirsty and burned waded into the river to die, so many that their bodies formed a dam. Radiation sickness began within thirty minutes. These are beautiful, functioning cities today, Scott notes — which is exactly why the accounts matter.
•       No Regrets, No Verdict. Truman defended the decision to his grave — and then some: when Hiroshima’s city council passed a resolution in 1958 urging him toward remorse, he wrote back that Japan had started the war, then held a press conference at his museum in Independence to distribute the reply. The Oppenheimer film’s chilly Oval Office scene is overdramatized, Scott thinks, but true to the core: the buck — and the moral weight — stopped with the commander-in-chief, not the scientists. Scott himself, pointedly, renders no verdict: “Nobody needs to hear James Scott in Charleston, South Carolina tell you what it is you should think.” Both sides laid out, 95 percent of the documents public, the reader left to grapple — which is perhaps why Black Snow sold well in Japan, and why Empire of Ashes will be published there next August 6.
 
About the Guest
 
James M. Scott is a Pulitzer Prize finalist, New York Times bestselling author, and former Nieman Fellow at Harvard, widely regarded as America’s leading historian of the Pacific War. His books include Target Tokyo (Pulitzer finalist), Black Snow, Rampage, The War Below, and, with Jack Carr, Targeted: Beirut. A scholar-in-residence at The Citadel who leads battlefield tours across the Pacific, he lives in Charleston, South Carolina. Empire of Ashes: Truman, Hirohito, and the Descent into Total War (W. W. Norton) is out now.
 
References:
 
•       Empire of Ashes: Truman, Hirohito, and the Descent into Total War by James M. Scott (W. W. Norton). The Charleston Post and Courier: “An amazing accomplishment.”
•       Black Snow by James M. Scott — the firebombing of Tokyo, and the book whose cut Hiroshima chapters beca...

“Intelligence is 100 percent human. AI is a tool created by humans to distill, digest, and distribute intelligence.” — Keith Teare
 
The working class died this week — at least in Palo Alto. Delivering the eulogy in our regular That Was The Week tech summary is my co-host Keith Teare. “Humans create intelligence,” (whatever that means) the Silicon Valley-based entrepreneur tells us. And so, in our AI age of supposedly abundant intelligence, he pronounces, human knowledge “should not be trapped inside experts, institutions, or companies.”
 
Check your pockets, everyone. Silicon Valley has another freebie for you. With AI, the entrepreneur promises, intelligence is democratized. Everybody gets it. We will all have the intelligence of a Nobel laureate at our fingertips. Even Keith.
 
And so he attacks Daron Acemoglu, the Nobel Prize-winning MIT economist who has called for a “pro-worker AI.” But, for Keith — a council-estate kid from Yorkshire whose lifetime ambition was to evacuate the working class — this is “complete bullshit.” Acemoglu’s ideas, he says, are an example of the “fetishization of workers” when, in fact, we should be celebrating the end of the “working class.”
 
What Acemoglu is calling for in his pro-worker AI manifesto is more government planning for today’s transition to the AI epoch. But Keith disagrees. So I asked him three times what government should do while AI kills the working (and middle) class. “Allow it to happen,” he finally answers. “A good upheaval.”
 
Good? The former “worker” will lack jobs, wages, healthcare, housing. Even food in an America now eliminating food stamps. No matter. Let them eat intelligence.
 
Five Takeaways
 
•       Humans Create Intelligence. Keith’s editorial thesis distinguishes individual intelligence — where experts live, and always will — from the collective sum of everything all humans, living and dead, have ever contributed. That collective stock was once locked in encyclopedias, libraries, and universities; for the first time, AI can aggregate, distill, digest, and distribute it, at a price falling toward everyone. Knowledge, he writes, “should not be trapped inside experts, institutions, or companies” — but note the fine print: experts don’t disappear in this democratization. If anything, they get elevated: the expert reading an AI’s output about viruses understands it very differently than the rest of us.
•       The End of the Age of Heroes? Noah Smith’s much-shared essay argues that AI ends the era of the mathematical hero — and that’s fine, since most people (truck drivers, financial advisers, executive assistants) never got to be heroes anyway. Keith’s rebuttal turns on his central distinction: AI and intelligence are not the same word. There is no evidence, he argues, that AI creates new knowledge — it understands and distributes the existing stock. Innovation still takes individuals, and those individuals now start from a far higher floor, leveled up to everything already known. Heroes don’t go away; they multiply. In the world of AI, he suspects, every single teacher becomes one.
•       “What Even Is Pro-Worker AI?” The week’s main event: Daron Acemoglu — via Yascha Mounk’s Persuasion interview and an Atlantic essay, with What Happened to Liberal Democracy out next week — wants AI agencies, grant programs, and public competitions to build “pro-worker AI.” Keith’s verdict: “complete bullshit.” The middle-class “fetishization of workers” is paternalistic; the wage is a temporary power relationship between employer and employee; and the end of the working class is precisely the progressive outcome — says the council-estate kid from Yorkshire whose aspiration was not to be working class. Pressed three times on what government should do amid the upheaval, Keith finally answered: “Allow it to happen… a good upheaval.” Though swap workers for people, he conceded, and he’d almost entirely agree — every teacher a hero, even in East Palo Alto.
•       Bandwagons and Silences. Regular people are being arrested protesting data centers; Erin Brockovich — a Keen On guest some years back — is assembling class actions; Ezra Klein has begun folding anti-big-tech language into abundance. A politician-led bandwagon, Keith argues, regressive but keyed to genuine local concerns. The stranger fact is the silence on the other side: neither Altman nor Amodei nor Demis Hassabis is making the public case that AI benefits everybody — astonishing, Keith says, and the vacuum Acemoglu is trying to fill. Hassabis himself stepped aside at Google this week — a scientist returning to science as Sergey Brin becomes AI czar — while the Nobel-winning AlphaFold team has been quietly broken up. “Something strange is going on there.”
•       A Drama in a Teacup. Is the AI economy real? Ed Zitron’s stat — 70 percent of Amazon, Microsoft, and Google’s AI revenue comes from OpenAI and Anthropic — is two-thirds right, says Keith, and no problem at all: beneath the concentration, the money comes from some two billion distributed users paying real subscriptions, and the revenues are sustainable. The Aschenbrenner postscript, via Porter Stansberry’s post of the week: he bet the chip layer (Samsung, SK Hynix) when the value sat a layer up, got the timing wrong more than the thesis, sold to Citadel at a discount — and kept his Anthropic shares, remaining a multi-billionaire. As for the coming reality check: Anthropic and OpenAI will IPO only when public capital beats private, and SpaceX’s wobble from $135 to $108 — through a 20 percent lockup release — counts as no catastrophe. Public markets, Keith reminds us, don’t determine the success of the underlying business.
 
About the Co-Host
 
Keith Teare is the publisher of That Was The Week, the essential weekly tech newsletter, and founder and CEO of SignalRank Corporation. A serial entrepreneur — co-founder of, among others, EasyNet and RealNames — he was present at the creation of the UK internet and has spent four decades at the intersection of technology, capital, and ideas. He joins Keen On America every Sunday to make sense of the week in tech. His AI-assisted book in progress is titled Who Owns Intelligence.
 
References:
 
•       That Was The Week — Keith’s newsletter, including this week’s editorial, “Humans Create Intelligence.”
•       Noah Smith — “The End of the Age of Heroes,” on what happens to human ambition when the machines do the math.
•       Daron Acemoglu — the Yascha Mounk interview at Persuasion, the Atlantic essay on pro-worker AI, and What Happened to Liberal Democracy, out next week.
•       The Financial Times — “Google’s AI shakeup boosts Brin as DeepMind’s Hassabis steps aside.”
•       Ed Zitron — on the 70 percent of hyperscaler AI revenue that flows from OpenAI and Anthropic.
•       Porter Stansberry — post of the week, on Leopold Aschenbrenner’s losses, Citadel’s discount, and the drama in a ...

“Democracy didn’t fall out of the sky. It was earned. It was created, and it was made manifest through protest.” — Gloria Browne-Marshall
 
Yesterday, Casey Michel described a United States of Oligarchy where the wealthy cosy up to dictators and destroy democracy. Today, Gloria Browne-Marshall describes a parallel America. In A Protest History of the United States, she explores 500 years of profound protest to what Michel coins the banality of the deal. If Casey Michel described the few who own the country, then Gloria Browne-Marshall chronicles the many who made it.
 
Her thesis is that a nation born of protest has been protesting with itself ever since. So Thomas Jefferson wrote the Declaration of Independence while owning the teenaged Sally Hemings. Democracy is protest’s child, not its parent. Rather than just falling out of the sky, she argues, American democracy was earned by protesters like her great hero, Daisy Bates, the Little Rock organizer whose mother was murdered by a white mob.
 
So where’s the protest now? “Too many people have outsourced their sense of outrage,” Gloria Browne-Marshall argues. Thus our Covid silos and the capitulating law firms. Her prescription for this malaise is, of course, to get out on the streets. She reminds us that the anniversary of the 1963 March on Washington, with its quarter of a million protesters, is coming up at the end of the month. So it’s been done before. And will be done again. The United States of protest rather than of oligarchy. That’s who we are. Sometimes, at least.
 
Five Takeaways
 
•       A Nation in Protest with Itself. America was born of protest — the Declaration itself was a protest document — and has argued with itself ever since: the empire builder rolling over the rights of others on one side, liberty-and-justice-for-all on the other. Jefferson embodies the conflict: theorist of protest, author of the Declaration, slaveholder at Monticello with the teenaged Sally Hemings. And the artists matter as much as the marchers, Browne-Marshall argues, in a hand-off from Monday’s Curtis White conversation: the Depression photographs that moved a government, The Grapes of Wrath doing what no pamphlet could — art brings the humanity of the issue to the fore.
•       Democracy Didn’t Fall Out of the Sky. Asked about the d-word, Browne-Marshall answers that she expected it to be dissent. Democracy came by way of protest: the workers, the women, the marginalized earned rights nobody was volunteering to hand over. Vernon Dahmer was burned alive in his Mississippi home in 1966 — in a democracy — for trying to vote; Seneca Falls in 1848 became the Nineteenth Amendment only in 1920. The Voting Rights Act gave nobody the vote; it protected a right people were dying to use. And protest’s victories hide in plain sight: the end of mandatory retirement at 65, disabled children in mainstream classrooms — all of it protested into existence.
•       January 6 and the Meaning of Nonviolence. Is January 6 a protest? Yes, she allows — a protest with criminal consequences, like any protest that turns violent; rob a bank and call it a protest against poverty and the consequences still arrive. Nonviolence, meanwhile, is the most misunderstood word in the American vocabulary: a philosophy — Gandhi to Bayard Rustin to King — in which protesters will not strike back even when attacked. It is not a standard that applies only to Black protesters while the actual violence, historically, comes from those attacking them. January 6, with its gallows, its ransacked offices, and its hunted officials, was many things; nonviolent protest it was not.
•       No Pension Fund: Daisy Bates. Browne-Marshall’s favorite figure in the book: the Little Rock organizer who learned at nine that the woman raising her was not her mother — her mother had been murdered by a white mob and thrown in the pond where Daisy swam as a child. She guided the Little Rock Nine into Central High under armed National Guard escort amid daily death threats; as NAACP secretary she chose jail over surrendering the membership list, a refusal that went to the Supreme Court; she faced sexism inside the movement itself, spoke before the United Nations — and died nearly penniless, fed by neighbors. Protest has no vacation plan and no pension fund. (Mother Jones was smuggled into the same answer. “You’re cheating.” “I know. I am.”)
•       Outsourced Outrage. Why the relative quiet now? COVID scattered Americans into silos; the administration’s shock-and-awe blitz kept them off balance; masked, nameless ICE agents and capitulating law firms (Paul Weiss, by name) spread fear; and — echoing Claire Stapleton’s moral-compass warning from earlier this week — “too many people have outsourced their sense of outrage,” mistaking an email or an Instagram post for action. What’s needed: leaders willing to fight, strategy and alliances, visible plans, and a protest that is for something — democracy, diversity, health, literacy. The model remains the March on Washington, whose anniversary falls August 28: one hundred organizers, a quarter-million regular people, and a government reminded of its own Constitution.
 
About the Guest
 
Gloria J. Browne-Marshall is a professor of constitutional law at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, a civil rights attorney, and an award-winning playwright whose work has been staged and televised. Her books include She Took Justice, The Voting Rights War, and Race, Law, and American Society. She is the founder of Martyrs Day, observed July 5 in honor of slain protesters, and host of the forthcoming She Took Justice podcast. A Protest History of the United States (Beacon Press, ReVisioning History series), winner of the 2026 Independent Publisher Book Awards gold medal for history, is now out in paperback. She lives in New York City.
 
References:
 
•       A Protest History of the United States by Gloria J. Browne-Marshall (Beacon Press) — 500 years of resistance, from Powhatan’s stand against the English in 1607 to the climate protests of today.
•       Curtis White’s On Resistance — Monday’s Keen On conversation on cultural resistance, to which this episode is the historian’s reply.
•       Claire Stapleton’s Don’t Be Evil — whose warning against outsourcing your moral compass finds its twin in Browne-Marshall’s “outsourced outrage.”
•       The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck — her example of art doing what no pamphlet can: bringing the humanity of an issue to the fore.
•       Daisy Bates and the Little Rock Nine — Central High School in Little Rock still stands as what Browne-Marshall calls a living monument to protest.
•      &nbs...

“Jared Kushner is one of the most powerful American diplomats of the twenty-first century — and he has no skill set to speak of that I can see.” — Casey Michel
 
Four years ago, the muckraking journalist Casey Michel came on this show to discuss how the United States has built the greatest money-laundering scheme in history. That pre-Trump 2.0 America, he says, looks quaint. His new book, United States of Oligarchy: How America’s Wealthiest Ally with Dictators, Weaken the U.S., and Destroy Democracy, describes an American casino where the Trump family has become the dealer with a perennially stacked deck.
 
The word “oligarchy” comes with 2,500 years of baggage. Aristotle, not averse to aristocracy, nonetheless warned of the rule of the few. Teddy Roosevelt preferred “plutocracy” as a way of describing the baronial rule of the late 19th century American capitalists. And, of course, it took a Roosevelt — the sickly scion of upper-crust New York — to dilute his own oligarchic caste with anti-trust law and inheritance & progressive income taxes.
 
Exhibit A in this American oligarchy is Jared Kushner, who has leveraged his father-in-law’s rotten casino to ally with dictators and destroy democracy both in America and around the world. Michel says Kushner has “no skill set to speak of” — apart, of course, from an insatiable greed for wealth and power. The banality of the deal.
 
So what to do? Michel is waiting for a 21st century Teddy Roosevelt — he names Talarico and Ossoff — who will tax and perhaps even prosecute Kushner and his fellow oligarchs. But I fear he is waiting for Godot. Teddy isn’t coming back. Nor is FDR. Don’t expect the banality of the current highly lucrative deal to end anytime soon.
 
Five Takeaways
 
•       Child’s Play. The anonymous shell companies and mystery donations of American Kleptocracy — dire enough in 2022 — now read as quaint. The scale has exploded (crypto, prediction markets, AI as accelerant), and so has the shamelessness: a Qatari luxury airliner gifted to a sitting president, and a $1.8 billion slush fund that will compensate January 6 rioters while granting Trump’s family, inner circle, and “associates” carte blanche from tax audits, past and future. America has had corrupt administrations — Grant, Harding, Nixon — but nothing, Michel argues, on this magnitude. Trump himself is symptom rather than cause: the culmination of trends decades in the making. “Shameless does not begin to describe it. I have to laugh — otherwise, I’m sure I’d just be crying.”
•       From Aristotle to the Trillionaire. Aristotle popularized oligarchy: rule of the few — who must also be the wealthiest. Teddy Roosevelt preferred “plutocracy,” and the Founders fought over “aristocracy”; Michel meets the 2020s where they are. The through line he found in the research: America’s anti-oligarchic champions come from inside the elite — above all TR, the sickly, bloodlet, electroshocked child of upper-crust New York who grew into the singular force against concentrated wealth: inheritance tax, progressive income tax, and a bully pulpit used without apology. Today’s benchmark: Gilded Age fortunes — Rockefeller’s $30 billion in modern terms — are pocket change beside centibillionaires and America’s first, briefly minted trillionaire.
•       Exhibit A: Jared Kushner. One of the most powerful American diplomats of the twenty-first century — Israel and Gaza, Russia and Ukraine, the Gulf — with, in Michel’s judgment, no skill set to speak of: a string of failures from 666 Fifth Avenue to the New York Observer, redeemed by the single best thing he ever did, marrying Ivanka Trump. MBS bragged Kushner was “in his pocket”; James Comer told an intermediary to tell him to fuck off — making Kushner, Michel suggests, a genuinely bipartisan target for future investigations. Andrew pushed back — the network of autocrats is real, the Harvard degree is real — and the conversation settled on Arendt: not evil, but indifferent to good and evil. What Kushner cares about: Ivanka and her father, his bottom line, and carrying water for Benjamin Netanyahu.
•       The Incentive Machine. Michel’s deeper argument indicts structures, not sinners: virtually none of this is illegal, which is precisely the problem. Corporate secrecy, campaign finance, and offshore taxation build an architecture in which allying with dictators is the rational move — if your competitor will meet MBS or Xi, you must too. Hence the corporate class’s standing ovation for Xi Jinping in San Francisco; Google’s Project Dragonfly censorship engine; Musk’s Tesla leverage in Beijing (and DOGE actions conspicuously in Chinese interest); the NBA’s progressive branding beside its Rwandan and Emirati partnerships; and Ireland, the thriving democracy at the bottom of the tax-haven barrel. Michel is happy to call the CCP one of history’s most monstrous regimes — and to note that no ideology, only rank financial interest, lays American CEOs at its feet.
•       Waiting for Teddy. Does oligarchy actually weaken America? Michel points to the Iran war’s aftermath — collapsed interceptor stocks, an intact Tehran regime, Gulf monarchs getting their dirty business done at American expense — plus Greenland threats, wobbling alliances, and the nuclear proliferation he expects among abandoned allies. Andrew pressed the counter-case three times: Wall Street at record highs, half of America holding retirement accounts. Michel’s answer: inequality beyond anything in the national experience — and a political moment, left and right, hungry for anti-oligarchic leadership. The GOP just moved to kill the shell-company database; the remedy is a twenty-first-century TR — a Talarico, an Ossoff — willing to be denounced as a communist agitator. “If Teddy Roosevelt can be, I suppose anyone can.”
 
About the Guest
 
Casey Michel is an author, investigative journalist, and director of the Combating Kleptocracy Program at the Human Rights Foundation. He is the author of American Kleptocracy — named by The Economist one of the best books for understanding financial crime — and Foreign Agents, and his writing on offshoring, foreign lobbying, and illicit wealth appears in The New York Times, Financial Times, The Atlantic, and Foreign Affairs, among others. He has testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee on illicit financial networks and national security, holds a master’s from Columbia’s Harriman Institute, and is currently sanctioned by the Russian regime for his work. United States of Oligarchy (St. Martin’s Press, August 4, 2026) is his third book.
 
References:
 
•       United States of Oligarchy by Casey Michel (St. Martin’s Press, Augu...

“We were still trying to change the world from the inside… and the empire struck back.” — Claire Stapleton on the Google Walkout
 
Earlier this week, the New York Times published an op-ed on how to fight back against big tech which included a reading list from previous guests on the show like Karen Hao, Yanis Varoufakis and Astra Taylor. Not included was Claire Stapleton’s Don’t Be Evil: Bad Bosses, Fake Promises, and My Escape from Big Tech. Partly, I assume, because this anti-Google jeremiad only came out yesterday.
 
An idealistic English major straight out of college, Stapleton joined Google in 2007, when few questioned Silicon Valley’s utopian language. Her first job was in Google’s ministry of truth, an internal communications department designed, as she now admits, to get everybody high on the mission. And that mission was to train Googlers into becoming obedient corporate cogs by neither blaming the system nor questioning authority.
 
While not exactly Winston Smith, she nonetheless rose in the bureaucracy. Rachel Whetstone (Steve Hilton’s wife) promoted Stapleton to the CEO’s communications team where, as the archivist of the sayings of the company’s two big brothers (Larry & Sergey), she became known as the “Bard” of Google. As an obedient corporate cog, she was both the message and the messenger. Until she wasn’t.
 
Like Orwell’s Smith, Google’s Claire Stapleton eventually turned her ministry of truth language on the ministry itself. In response to the $90 million exit package of a senior Google exec accused of sexual misconduct, she co-organized the Google Walkout of 20,000 employees. Two months later, her role was hollowed out. Then she lost her job. Not quite Room 101. No rats. But not a lot of fun.
 
So is Google evil? Stapleton doesn’t know. But the former Bard of Google acknowledges that Larry & Sergey’s promises of making the world a better place are no longer credible. Today, idealistic young college grads want to fight back against Silicon Valley. Today, nobody outside the internal communications department of Google, OpenAI or Anthropic believes that technology is making the world a better place. Like Claire Stapleton, we all now want to escape from big tech.
 
Five Takeaways
 
•       Getting High on the Mission. Google in 2007 wasn’t selling a job; it was selling a worldview — and Stapleton’s department, internal communications, existed to pump the mission, the values, and the founders’ folksy TGIF theater into a workforce growing by tens of thousands. The perks were the philosophy made visible: laundry, haircuts, dentists, masseurs — “letting Google be your housewife.” The indoctrination had a curriculum, too: Fred Kofman’s “radical accountability” training taught new hires to be players, not victims — which sounds empowering until you notice, as Stapleton did in a G-chat to her brother, that it means never blaming the system: “today I learned that if my team is dysfunctional, it’s my fault.”
•       The Bard of Google. Rachel Whetstone — ex-London, politically shrewd, now married to California’s Republican gubernatorial nominee — drafted Stapleton onto Larry Page’s communications when Page retook the CEO job, making her the archivist of the founder’s vision (until, in a twist she still can’t quite believe, he literally lost his voice). From there: Creative Lab, “the alchemist lab of Google’s branding,” wrapped in change-the-world gobbledygook; then YouTube’s curation team, a job so dispensable that nobody on earth would notice if it stopped — David Graeber’s bullshit jobs made flesh, complete with colleagues vanishing to the gym for hours. Her bad bosses, she notes, were workaday and familiar — which is precisely the point. Laszlo Bock’s Work Rules explains why Google tried to constrain managers’ power: given too much, they abuse it, pettily.
•       Normie, Not Whistleblower. Unlike Sarah Wynn-Williams’ Careless People — a whistleblower’s damning portrait of Zuckerberg and Sandberg — Don’t Be Evil is a coming-of-age story from the rank and file: earnest, unjaded, “normie.” What’s genuinely new in it is the workers’-eye view of the tech-labor moment: a company that hired idealists on the promise of changing the world, then watched the worker-management relationship transform with whiplash speed once those idealists asked what corporate accountability actually looks like. “We were still trying to change the world from the inside, from a different direction, as we lumbered our way through labor organizing 101… and the empire struck back.”
•       The Walkout and the Bill. The rupture came in 2018: the Me Too summer, an engineer’s memo against diversity itself, and the Times’ revelation of Andy Rubin’s $90 million exit after credible harassment findings. The moms listserv lit up; at TGIF, management read talking points “designed to absorb dissent, project empathy, and move right along” — radicalizing the woman who used to write them. The Walkout drew 20,000 employees. The bill arrived two months later: her role hollowed out, transfers blocked across the organizer group, Meredith Whittaker’s role dismantled, the rubber room. The group went public — the nuclear option — and Google offered severance. Stapleton, pregnant, asked for a year. An HR veteran’s verdict, years later: “They sure got you out cheap.” And the villains of her story, she notes, were mostly women — her own management chain — while Susan Wojcicki offered the older generation’s lament: you have no idea how hard it was for me.
•       Don’t Outsource Your Moral Compass. Is Google better than the rest? There’s no noxious star — Sundar Pichai harmonizes rather than dominates — but the company owns the infrastructure of the digital world, and “is it more evil? less evil? I don’t know.” The deeper shift is industry-wide: Larry Page’s “treat workers well and they’ll contribute tenfold” has become “your job could easily go to AI, so be grateful.” Her advice to the young and idealistic: keep some skepticism; hold your own values in your own mind; let work be part of your life without letting it take over; build solidarity instead of “letting the overlords do their overlord thing.” The good news, she suspects, is that the spell is breaking anyway: audiences now boo the AI ads in movie theaters.
 
About the Guest
 
Claire Stapleton is a writer, communications consultant, and tech labor activist. She spent twelve years at Google in communications, marketing, and executive ghostwriting roles — becoming known as “the Bard of Google” — before co-organizing the 2018 Google Walkout, in which 20,000 employees protested the company’s mishandling of sexual harassment; The New York Times called it a watershed moment in tech. She writes an existential advice column for tech workers on Substack, and her account of her Google years, “The Voice of Google,” appeared in The New Yorker. Her first book is