In November of 2018, more than 20,000 Google employees walked off the job, protesting the company’s alleged mishandling of sexual harassment allegations. Claire Stapleton, then a marketing manager at Google, was one of them, helping to organize what came to be known as the Google Walkout for Real Change. Yet the cultural changes Stapleton and her peers sought were difficult to implement across the company.
Now, Stapleton is telling her full story in her memoir Don’t Be Evil: Bad Bosses, Fake Promises, and My Escape from Big Tech. Vogue spoke to the author about attempting to reform Google from the inside and the other tech nonfiction that inspired her.
Vogue: You describe Google when you started there, in 2007, as a “full-blown cultural event.” I’m curious about whether you can pinpoint when the company’s appeal began to fade for you.
Claire Stapleton: I think the walkout moment was so dramatic that it surprised me to go back and look at the whole history of my time at Google—12 years—and see that I did have a lot of weird cognitive-dissonance moments throughout. I mean, even from the very beginning, they put us through this comms department training I talk about in the book that was called “Radical Accountability,” and it was really weird. It was this Silicon Valley career guru who Sheryl Sandberg loved, and it was basically telling the young people of the corporation the kind of narrative we now see in tech, where blaming the circumstances is completely verboten, and to be a high performer and to be valuable in the organization, you have to be sort of taking accountability for everything at all times. I feel like I really internalized that as a young person.
How could you not?
Towards the end of my first stint at Google, so within my first five years, Larry Page became the CEO, and he had this vision for Google where technology was going to do all the hard things in life, all the annoying tasks, so humans could get back to doing what they do best, quote: “Learning, living, and loving.” I kind of believed Google was going to improve the world in all these exciting ways; he was like, “We’re going to extend the human lifespan, and we’re bringing effortless Wi-Fi to the planet.” When I would listen to that rhetoric and all these weird techno-utopian ideas, I’d be like, what are we actually doing here? Because at the end of the day, Google was such a huge online advertising juggernaut, and it was becoming hard to square some of the vision things with what Google actually seemed to be doing well.
When I moved to New York, I worked in a department called Creative Lab, and even though I ended up staying another six years or something, that was really when the scales began to fall from my eyes. I think anyone who has been in the creative agency world knows that you’re selling something, but there’s also a lot of grandiose rhetoric around it that it’s something else, something virtuous, something inherently good. Google was that on steroids, because the language of everything is so moralistic and sweeping. I had a horrible time in this department, and just a really classic difficult manager relationship—couldn’t get put on projects, didn’t really know how to navigate it, and felt completely destabilized by that. Even when I was on projects, though, it was just pitching to the world what a virtuous, progressive, amazing center of the future Google was. I had so many different moments that were just like, there’s this massive gap between what my job is as a spokesperson and what I actually experience, and tuning into that gap was sort of how I ended up becoming a rabble-rouser.
